Hope Is a Garden
There are a number of lessons I tell myself each year and then promptly ignore, only to learn again. One is that the beans and squash will take over everything. And by the end of July they had. The squash expanded into paths and over half of the lone grassy patch under the swing set (my kids weren’t pleased). The beans climbed higher than I thought possible, covering trellises in record time, and also tomato cages, the raised bed chicken wire fences, and even one branch of the biggest pear tree. Carrots on the north side of a trellis stopped growing. Whole tomato plants simply disappeared. The squash plants, it turns out, also like to climb. They took over a few tomato cages from the other side and made it halfway up the swing set before giving up and climbing down again. While I will probably ignore myself again next spring, it is worth planting the squash and beans away from the tomatoes, and ideally in their own section of the garden where they can climb over each other as much as they please.