Decisions, decisions…

First, take a look at this picture of our front garden bed:

About six weeks ago, I planted marigold seeds that I had saved from last year. I had already spent my limit on gardening for the summer, and I figured if these seeds didn’t grow and produce flowers, at least I wasn’t out any money. It was an experiment. So, I watered, and set up pink yard flags all around them so no one would step in my little bed (children and solicitors are very bad for stepping in my dirt). Then, there were sprouts! So I danced a little jig and kept watering. After a while, I noticed that some of the wee plants don’t quite look like the rest. (”Which one of these is not like the other?”) I know that some of them were forget-me-nots, as I had just dumped last year’s dead flowers in the bed, in the name of compost. But there were also some others…which somehow I didn’t recognize until this weekend. I swear there were geraniums (same story as the forget-me-nots), but these others? The ones on the left, starting to tower over my beautiful marigolds?

TOMATOES!

How funny is that? (Clue: really darn hilarious.) And now, I am at a loss, both in knowing how they came to be there, and what to do. I am loathe to pull a perfectly healthy looking tomato plant. I have no idea what kind of tomatoes they are…but I am sure they are in fact tomatoes. I am not about to put a tomato cage in my front bed (one cage would take over the whole space), so if I leave them, I’ll have to stake them. I’m considering it. I don’t feel qualified to transplant them to the backyard where I do have some space. Obviously they wanted to grow here…

…and perhaps the biggest irony of all is that I planted some more marigold seeds in the tomato bed in the back, and they never came up. Crazy garden.

Also in the picture are periwinkle on the left, and a Japanese goldenleaf barberry shrub on the right. Both are ridiculously easy to grow and very hardy and drought tolerant, meaning I never really water them separately, just the flowers, and they flourish. We had to cut them back because they were taking over the flower bed. So they are nicely trimmed for the photo.

And in other news…I am considering upgrading to the new flatter jars seen here. I have a bunch of the old canning jars, and now I’ve got people trained to return them to me, so I wonder if I’ll ever actually need them. Okay, I have made a decision that when and if I need new jars I will get these cool new ones. Hip, yet old fashioned. Kind of like me!

And also? I am going to have a raspberry jam apprentice! I have a friend who adores the jam even more than I do, and even though I am pretty generous with it, she wants more! Which I completely understand. So I will take her berry picking and go through the whole process with her. Hmmm…more jam for her, and more for me! Maybe I’ll offer her a good deal on my jars. Then I can buy the new ones!