Know that no matter what your gardening friend does, you will never be a staker.  If you try it yet again, you will instead have tomatoes which wander all over the ground.  Admit your bad staking habits and, next year, buy more of the pretty green cages so that you can tuck the tomatoes in here and there as though putting them down for a nap. This also goes for green beans.  You are a bush bean person, not a pole bean person, which fits not only your gardening personality, but also your body type. Know that you're going to buy yet another rose bush.  It's apparently an addiction, and you can't help yourself.  So, do some research before the new ones are introduced and try to only buy those which don't need spraying, or much food for that matter.  Although shrub roses won't win any prizes for best blooms...

From the time Bear was a very little girl, we played a game which we call "I love you more than . . . ."  The rules of the game are very fluid, and I don't remember how it started, but it always tickled her into belly laughs and sometimes, oohs and aahs.  It goes like this: "I love you more than sunflowers love the sun." "Well, I love you more than shoes love shoelaces." "Mommy, I love you more than your hands love gardening gloves." "Bear, I love you more than tires love asphalt" (We own a paving company after all.) As you can see, the sillier the better.  A word association game made of the animate and inanimate which need each other.  We played it as I drove her to school, to tae kwon do classes, to buy groceries, or to the plant store.  We still occasionally play...

Love's Philosophy The fountains mingle with the river, And the rivers with the ocean; The winds of heaven mix forever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single; All things by a law divine In another's being mingle-- Why not I with thine? See, the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No sister flower could be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea;-- What are all these kissings worth, If thou kiss not me? Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822, was a contemporary of John Keats and Lord Byron. His second marriage was to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. He remains famous for the lyrical quality of his poetry, and he was idolized by the generation of poets who came after him. Shelley drowned in a boating accident just before he turned thirty. ...

Dear Carol and Mary Ann and all of our other friends, I am not happy with the photo above.  It was early morning, and the shutter moved so slowly that I blurred it.  By the time I realized my mistake, I had already committed the blankety-blank tomato hornworm to the netherworld.  I am only including it as representative of my garden as a whole this summer.  The spring veggies were great, but summer not so much.  Plagued by tomato worms (and other creepy crawleys), lack of space for the sprawling summer veggies, June weather that thought it was August, and now August weather that thinks it's fall, I am throwing in the towel.  I hate to focus on the negative, so this is my last letter about vegetables.  Carry on without me if you will.  I understand. I am sick of cucumbers, and honestly, there was never enough to share...