Not everything comes up roses in my garden

IT’S HARVEST time in the vege garden. Or so the gardening books tell me. They haven’t told me what to do with the fab crop of dog vomit slime mould that’s reappeared, or the plethora of mushrooms that may or may not be shaggy parasols and I’m not having a munch on one to find out.

I haven’t seen my tiger worms since the attack of the killer pumpkin plant that engulfed the worm farm, and my corn, and my potatoes, and marched across the garden straight through the cape gooseberry bush and is still going.

I can’t find my rhubarb, either, which could mean one of two things. Either my rhubarb-hating husband has sprayed it with Roundup again or it’s now under the comfrey plant that seems to have taken up any garden the pumpkin had missed in its rampage.

During the summer I planted lettuces and carrots and cabbages and cucumbers, both apple and telegraph. I planted tomatoes of red, yellow and . . . supposedly . . . black. I planted beans in shades of green and yellow and purple and I planted a choko plant that I was warned would take over the entire property and quite possibly the neighbourhood.

The choko plant I had nurtured in my pantry over the winter, waiting until the very last of the frosts before I let it out to toddle about on the deck until it was big enough to plant in the garden.

I was careful where I put it as the neighbours were planning a summer wedding in their garden and the choko wasn’t invited. So it went over by the garage where it could run free, and I picked up an old bed-base from the recycle shop at the dump for it to clamber over.

Then I watered my choko and fed it coffee grounds and manure tea and weeded it and cared for it. And the darned thing is barely a metre tall and all wispy and feeble and has produced exactly nothing.

Of the beans, only the purple ones flourished. Where the green and yellow ones were, a thornless yellow raspberry has sprung up instead.

It doesn’t have any raspberries on it, but I know that’s what it is, because I planted it there about three years ago and it promptly keeled over and I had never seen it since. I thought it was dead.

The tomato plants grew well. The yellow ones strangely came out red. So did the “black” ones. As for the red ones . . . I’m not sure which ones were actually meant to be the red ones.

I got two buckets-full of redcurrants. And about five blackcurrants. Not buckets-full, just actual individual currants. That’s fine — blackcurrants smell like cats’ wee anyway and you can tell them I said that. And nobody likes blackcurrant jam anyway. So there.

I raised a lovely crop of slugs, on my lettuces. And my carrots fed some wee wormy things, which I thought was awfully kind of me.

The cabbages and broccoli and cauli seedlings all got mixed up and I wasn’t sure which were what, but that’s okay because when the white butterflies had finished with the local dairy farmer’s feed crop, they all came over to my house in a huge cloud, and laid their babies on my brassicas and all I got was stalks. I got lots of apple cucumbers though, and three lovely long telegraph cucumbers and one that looked like someone’s big toe, but green. Apple cucumbers are nice for the first couple of weeks. Then they tend to lie around in the vege crisper until even the crisper can’t save them and they go squidgy and the pigs get to eat them. The pigs don’t eat comfrey though. Nor do the goats, or the sheep, or the horses or the chickens. Even my spectacular horde of slugs and caterpillars shun the comfrey. It’s meant to be good as compost and as a poultice for broken bones. Heaven forbid my family breaks enough bones to need an entire garden of comfrey. Compost it will have to be. Most of all this season I was looking forward to the big potato reveal. I had constructed a spud-patch fit for a king, dug deep with well composted horse manure, coffee grounds and leaf litter. I turned it over and piled it up, planted my spuds and watered and weeded and hilled them up and waited. All seven spuds were lovely. Especially the three tiny ones. So pumpkin soup it will be this winter . . . there are big grey pumpkins in the grapevine, in the gooseberries and under the feijoa trees. There are pumpkins in the cucumber patch, the strawberry bed and climbing the bean frame. It will be nice to have a few pumpkins to roast and to mash and to share. Shame, though — I had actually planted peas.