Man: Zero, Garden: One

As I walked trudged up to the garden this weekend with my camera, Rob yelled after me, I can just see your post headline now! I guess the man knows me by now. In the spirit of Man Vs. Food, this was the most fitting title I could come up with. The garden has beat me. It has won and I've so been defeated.

Approaching the natural disaster area

This is what it looks like when you look down at the ground.

Self portrait entitled "Me and six feet weeds"

I am sad to say I got little to no joy from this garden this year. We are about 2 seconds from mowing over the whole damn thing. I really don't know where I went wrong. It's true I did little to no weeding from July on, and it didn't help that we were gone almost two weeks in the middle of the July, but seriously? Would you think the weeks would have grown this thick? We can't even FIND our rows of potatoes. Rob has to take the shovel and whack the weeds away like a machete in the area that we knew they were in and then just dig and hope. And yes, we got over an ice cream pail full of potatoes. But that was for the whole row. And the snow peas? About 10. Green beans? One serving with dinner. Cucumbers? 3 plants of the 4 eaten by deer before they even grew big. 4 cherry tomatoes, 2 plum tomatoes. There are carrots and small onions in there somewhere but it will take some weed whacking to find them. The onions are small, of course, because no sunlight can get through the mass canopy of weeds covering them. 

It's not like I would have been that disappointed if I didn't get enough to freeze or can. But I really didn't even get enough to justify the time and money and energy a garden requires just to plant it. I'm really not sure what I'm doing wrong. Is it my soil? Sun? Are the deer just too much to fight? Is it all worth it?

I had such vim and vigor when I started this whole gardening thing last summer but now, I just don't know. It probably doesn't help that my memories of gardens are from my grandparents where the sky seemed to be the limit to how much they could grow. I only wish they were still here to ask them how they did it. Aargh! I'm down and out! Next time you see me, just throw a tomato or zucchini my way.  

Just don't tell me that you grew it yourself or I might kick you in the shins.