My Summer As an Elderly Lady Ep. 1: The Vegetable Garden

My summer started out like this:

I was ending a long semester of math classes in the city along with working two jobs. I adore said jobs, but they were wearing me out. So when I was offered a serving job at the breakfast spot that I'd worked the previous two summers, I jumped on it. I loved that place. The workers were fantastic, the food was great, and I'd get to work with the boytoy every once in a while. 

I started back work the Wednesday after I got home. Two hours into my shift, I was informed that we were going out of business on Sunday.

After a long exhausting week of working every day and mourning the loss of my favorite place (and two terrible weekend shifts full of hour and a half ticket times and angry old people), I was unemployed. Great.

Most teenagers twenty-year-olds would be like "Weeeeeeeeeeeeee! Summerrrrrrrrrrr!" I, on the other hand am no normal twenty-year-old.

I crunched the numbers of upcoming rent and tuition bills in my head and after nights of gameplanning and drinking and freak-out worthy crying, I found a shitty, minimum wage hostessing job at a local Mexican restaurant.

But before then? I had to come up with some way to entertain myself during the hours of 8 to 5 when the boytoy was at work. 

(I don't have a car...or a license. I just never got one. Phobias, man. Shut up. I'm working on it.)

Thus marks my transition into an old lady. I was stuck at home all day with nothing to do, so I started a quilt (which I'll talk about later) and a vegetable garden. 

My vegetable garden is my baby. 

I'm growing jalapeños, heirloom tomatoes, zucchini squash, and crimson red watermelons. Count on regular updates.

This is when  I planted the garden about a month ago. It's hard to see the plants because they are all babies. The jalapenos are in a row at the top, the tomatoes at the right, and the watermelons are all down the left. Honestly, I planted them all tooooo close together, but I didn't wanna tear up more of M's grass than I had to, you know?

Zucchini pre-blossums

Watermelons pre-blossums

My jalapenos grew from baby tiny peppers to real peppers in like two weeks. They are still only like an inch or two long, but they are getting there. M and I go out and check on them every day and the progress is ridiculous, man. I don't really even like them. I'm growing them for him, but man, I'm proud of these little suckers.

My tomatoes are growing slowly but surely. I have like six growing right now and several more blooms. M is dying to make fried green tomatoes with them, but these suckers are gonna grow all the way.

And this concludes my nerd fest for the day. I did grow up in the rural south. What do you expect from me?

May the force be with y'all.

DB