Call Any Vegetable

One of the joys of gardening is harvesting your own home grown crops. In this instance the home grown crops are represented by a potato (it's been baked). The onions and tomatoes came from a shop and are only there because I liked the photo. Our potato haul this year was reasonable but not large. The quality of the potatoes is however variable. They're OK for mashing and passable for baking but they tend to deteriorate into mush if over boiled. The deterioration happens quickly so you have to watch and test them constantly. It's stressful at the time, like observing an unexploded potato bomb (I should know). We tend not to eat a lot of spuds so it's not a major a problem. 

Our peas were a wild success but for all the space and care it takes to grow them we only got the equivalent of a large bag of frozen ones. They were tasty though and nice to eat freshly picked during garden meanderings. We also reared tiny amounts of strawberries, gooseberries, plums and a few pears. The apples are still too small to count as fruit so we're not expecting much of a yield now. As for the kale, cabbage and cauliflower, we suffered a total wipe out thanks to invisible pests.

In the end we'll never eat well from this garden and now that the cats are actively using selected chunks of it as field toilets, I'm thinking that we've achieved peak garden. Actually we may have reached it some time ago and now be entering a period of steady decline ending with a scrappy, leaf and moss covered wilderness where exotic insect populations can thrive and expand exponentially, eventually overwhelming us. A fitting end for this postage stamp sized outpost of civilisation I'd say.