Garden, North Carolina, July 4th 2019

What a braggy Braggart McBragpants.

His garden reminds me of the tomatoes my mother grew on-base at Barksdale on the side of the house right below the window of my sister's bedroom. This was so random. My mother had no idea what she was doing. The bushes grew profusely. They bloomed and produced two crops in the summer. My mother was so well chuffed about how well the tomatoes grew.

I flatly did not care about tomatoes. 

What a stupid thing to care about.

We have a photographs of my little brother that day. He was five years old and he looked like a towheaded Tom Sawyer. His hair was white feathers. His scrawny body toothpicks and rubber bands. He was a boy-bird. His manner of dress hopelessly careless, actually dressed just barely. Like some little boy that we found, or one who followed us home. He was utterly 100% unselfconscious. And cute as a bug. 

We were trimming the grass at the sidewalk. So the whole thing looked architectural. Perfectly linear. Brauhaus to the fascist maximum.  That was the thing about living on-base. You had to keep up appearances perfectly. And I mean perfectly. We were all being inspected continuously. It was a thing with those people. They're quite rigid. They're actually totally Nazi-like about their conformity. Extremely anal retentive. 

I mean it.

Life on-base is extremely structured. Individualism is discouraged. 

As a way of life it was not me at all. Sometimes I would pray. "Lord, why did you put me in with this weird outfit? Is this some kind of spiritual trick? Is this like 'do the opposite" type configuration to straighten me out? So in the end I'm more balanced? Come on, tell me. Because I think I'm onto your ways. It's axiom down here on earth that you work in mysterious ways. This is one of them innit."  

I too have a chile pepper.

One that I didn't even order.

I kind of wish places would stop including random free seeds when you order the seeds that you want. They just stick in an extra package. A lot of thought goes into selecting seeds for specific things and then vendors include all kind of crap that you're not interested in. They are suggesting "Plant these!" 

Such as these peach peppers. I did not order these. But they grew in their Jiffy peat pods better than the others that I did order, bloomed and set fruit inside before the weather warmed up enough to transplant them outside.

So I really had nothing to do with this except I stuck the seeds in Jiffy pods and watered them.

Son of a bee hive that makes me mad. It's other people's ideas that are working. Not mine. 

Ew, I hate those free seeds to pieces.

This is Colorado where spring was skipped this year. We went winter - summer with nothing in between. So nothing was possible until late June. 

Late f'k'n June. 

And as shown people were still skiing. Snow skiing, not water skiing. 

The traditional French white beans were planted three times. So far they have a 1% germination rate. Had they all germinated this large tall pot would have 150 bean plants already five feet up the wall. Instead I have one plant popping its head out of the dirt, now it's July 9th. 

The two caladium plants are the first of some hundred or so that I planted all over. They sat in the dirt and chilled for full month. This is the first sign of life.

The various peppers are blooming all over the place.

But they were started in Jiffy pods. They outgrew them and leaned toward the light. They are long and scraggly, nothing at all like upright pepper plants. All of them are sorely misshapen and hanging off the sides of the pots. All of them look weird.

Some peppers grow upright and others hang down. 

Some peppers go, "HERE I AM, BIRDS, COME PICK ME!" While other peppers go, "I'm hiding. Leave me alone."

All the long Chinese beans were planted three times. Finally they're germinating and a few started climbing the railing. I'm expecting them to form a wall of foliage but their season might be too short to make beans. The beans probably won't be that lengthy. We'll see.

This French white bean is the only one that grew in this pot. So far. It grew quickly to the top of its trellis. I added a bamboo stick so it can grow to the roof, the floor of the patio above it.

These are only tomato blooms so far.

Each pot has a row of Chinese long beans to form a wall of foliage. ↑↓.

The pot below is loaded with oxalis triangularis completely. So far they haven't all emerged. 

These are heirloom petunias, not the kind you buy in nurseries. There is nothing here that came from a nursery this year. Everything was started inside from seeds. Except the caladiums were started from bulbs. And the oxalis started from rhizomes. 

The tomatoes failed in the planters. All of them failed. The scratchy coconut liners destroyed their stems. 

This planter is loaded with so much variety of things they'll just have to fight it out. It has beans along the back edges, caladiums that haven't emerged yet, and all kinds of seeds sprinkled throughout covering the surface of dirt. It has two watermelon plants and cucumbers planted. We'll see what happens. 

Although the season is incredibly short this year all is not hopeless. 

The dirt is excellent. I copied the natural black dirt that I recalled of dirt that I scooped up from the Pennsylvania forest for my mother's African violet that did so remarkably well. 

I watched way too many videos about what natural things to put into soil to copy that. So many that I have the dirt-knowledge internalized. 

And I haven't yet added the living microorganisms. Whatever living is in there came from the additives such as compost and worm castings. I have the Boogie Brew but it's still too early for that because there are so many new seedling that have only just now germinated. 

But when I do add the Boogie Brew, KABOOM, then the garden will be truly started, and it's on for the rest of the season. 

We gardener types like to experiment.