LINCOLN SQUARE — Much as we all love a good child prodigy story — Mozart, Tiger Woods, Doogie Howser — there's something to be said for the late bloomer, especially in the garden.
Temperatures are dipping, trees are turning color and the days are getting shorter, all harbingers of the winter to come, but my vegetables are still producing new flowers like it's mid-summer.
In the case of my beans, that's because I actually did something right. My peppers, not so much.
Let's, for the time being, accentuate the positive.
I started harvesting beans back in July and haven't stopped since. For awhile there, Dave and I were enjoying a side dish of steamed beans almost nightly before dinner in lieu of salad.
Even though the rate of production has now tapered off to a weekly harvest, on any given day I can head over to my garden plot and there will be a couple dozen beans in various stages of development.
I never tire of watching the cycle repeat itself — if there's one thing I've learned about myself as a gardener, it's that I'm a grower. The fun, for me, is in the process — seed to sprout to flower to fruit — and not so much the end result, as evidenced by all the spoiled tomatoes in my vegetable rotter crisper.
The secret to my success?
I read up on "how to harvest beans" last year and, for once, retained the information. I picked them early and often, as recommended, which encouraged continual regeneration. I'm not saying I understand why or how this works, it just did. Next year it might not.
Likewise with my tomatoes, I also applied lessons from ghosts of gardens past.
This year's motto was think small, as in take a pass on the beefsteak and go for cherry and grape varieties, a shift in strategy I hit upon after wandering the garden last summer and taking note of other people's crops.
Three billion globules later — with a billion green tomatoes still on the vine and an equal number of flowers bursting forth — I am looking like a botanical savant.
A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with the fellow who has a plot two over from mine and he had arrived at the same conclusion — smaller is better — making us a consensus of two. Both of us had also experienced blight/fungus/some sort of problem with our orange tomatoes, leading us to further refine our theory of plant superiority: smaller and red is better.
Somewhere Gregor Mendel is either turning in his grave or laughing his ass off.
Which brings us, at last, to my peppers.
I have harvested to date all of two peppers, approximately the size of a quarter. (Try saying this fast at home: Patty Piper picked a pair of puny peppers.)
But now that it's October and frost is threatening, my plants have suddenly sprung to life, sprouting flowers from base to tip.
If I were the sort to anthropomorphize her plants, I'd say the peppers were sending me a passive-aggressive message: See what we could've done if you'd paid us the least amount of attention.
Actually my peppers are probably in full bloom, if I understand the science correctly, because they know their days are numbered. They're desperate to produce seeds after spending the entire summer overshadowed, literally and figuratively, by their neighbors, sandwiched between towering tomato plants and sprawling bush beans.
Crowded out by these more aggressive bullies, the peppers never had a chance. When they should have been nearing their peak, they still looked like seedlings.
And I did nothing to help them.
At some point, gardening, especially when it's a part-time-couple-of-hours-a-week endeavor, becomes a form of triage.
You pick the plants that have the best chance of survival, or that you find exceedingly intriguing, and you do your utmost to help them reach their potential. And the others — heard much from me about my basil or arugula? — well, they're kind of on their own.
The peppers fell into that latter group, in large part because I had settled for whatever seedlings were available at the garden center when what I really wanted to grow were red bell peppers — which, in case you hadn't noticed, are abundantly available for purchase at the store.
Does that make me a horrible person or minimally a moderately bad gardener with attachment issues?
Every single pepper blossom, which has zero chance of developing into a full-blown vegetable, says yes.
Not that I think plants can talk.
