It was difficult for my mother, living in a flat in San Francisco, with a concrete back yard where she hung laundry. She grew up on a ranch and always had things growing. The concrete back yard had a little dirt filled container that she used to plant vegetables. I don't remember her planting anything other than carrots (though she probably did). I remember when we harvested the carrots they were about 6" long and very thin. But she grew them. I don't remember her growing anything more than that year and I have pictures of people standing where the dirt used to be, so maybe they covered it up.
As she got her own house, after David was born, she was thrilled that she had a garden and she planted a lot of things. She could take a dry stick and make it bloom, where I can take a flowering plant and turn it into a dry stick. After she and Fred married, they had a mobile home with a small garden and she raised orchids and roses and the garden was beautiful. When she moved here to Davis, the facility had a garden where they encouraged people to plant things, but it was like she lost her interest in plants.
We have this wonderful back yard, but it's never had grass because when we moved in here we had dogs that ran around and we couldn't keep them off the growing grass. I tried planting vegetables and I remember how big the zucchini got. The kids hated zucchini and I made a lot of zucchini bread. When I served it for dinner, I told them that the longer it took them to eat THIS zucchini, the bigger the one still growing would get.
I did get corn on the cob one year that was very good. Didn't get much, but enough to enjoy it. And we had several fruit trees. The peach tree produced a lot until the year it died. The apricot tree stopped producing apricots and had to be taken down. What's left is the apple tree, which is dripping with apples this year. Ned harvested several a couple of weeks ago and it's time to harvest again. They are now very ripe and taste sweeter than they did with the first batch he harvested. They are smaller than they would be if we had removed some of them before they started growing big.
Ned decided to plant tomatoes and he planted two plants, and a basil bush. The basil is really going to town and we've cut it back several times and it keeps growing. The tomato plants are starting to produce. We have two cherry tomatoes and one small regular tomato that are starting to turn red. We're not gong to get a salad out of them, but Ned will carve them up so we can each have half a cherry tomato and a piece of the other tomato.
Next year, maybe he'll plant more tomatoes, since he knows that they will grow.
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