Year End Review, or, At Least the Fence is Still Standing

Don't get me wrong, it's still broken, the fence. But while it may be listing in spots, rotted in others and individual boards may have defected in the night like cowards, the fence is, by and large, still there.

And that, I'm sorry to say, counts among our notable achievements for Fencebroke's 2014 gardening season. Additional triumphs include: buying a wheelbarrow and eating tomatoes. Rather a lot of tomatoes, if I recall. The fact that a lot of tomatoes grew to be eaten at all was in itself a triumph, but here the credit must go more to an unusually favorable growing season than to our own efforts. These same ideal conditions led to a bumper crop of unappetizing, difficult to prepare but aesthetically appealing—in an alien spaceship sort of way—summer squashes. I don't know if that's an achievement or not.

In evaluating FPG's performance (which graded out at a solid C/C-, for those seeking a touch of arbitrary pedagogy in their garden bloggery), such factors were considered as: planted vs. successful crops (one wormy rutabaga doth not a stew make); percentage of beds/edging torn up in frustration; number of free plants successfully shoehorned into the planting scheme; is there a planting scheme?; number of zip-ties used; number of “mulligans” used; number of stumps removed; number of free plants removed from the planting scheme; stop taking home free plants from work; number of trips to the ER/urgent care; percentage of projects resulting in trips to the ER/urgent care; calm moments of grateful reflection vs. calm moments of grateful reflection interrupted telling Daisy not to eat dirt; tools lost; toys lost; plant-tags lost; patience lost; focus lost; look—a hummingbird!; number of laps run by screaming toddlers; remonstrations not to play in the bird bath; OK, fine, play in the bird bath; vines trellised; vines admonished; vines punished; toddlers trellised; toddlers admonished; footballs thrown vs. frisbees thrown; wading pools inflated; leaves crunched underfoot; stolen moments in the sun …

OK, this year wasn't so bad.