The Green Monster

I am not a farmer. I am not even a good gardener. I'm a guy who likes a good movie or story of any kind, a cocktail, and driving fast. Don't worry, not all at the same time. I do like a well tended garden. I just don't want to do all that work. So when Mark insisted that we put in a vegetable garden, I was like "Okay. What, a row of corn and a couple of tomato plants?" No, Mark ran out and bought all kinds of plants. Cucumbers, peppers, beans, peas, various herbs, and a couple of things that I'm not sure of. The problem arose with where Mark wanted this garden. First of all, it was all sod. Sod is a bitch to dig up and turn into arable soil. What happened is that I dug up half of that area before I quit. Too damn hard. Now I had half the garden Mark had wanted, with twice the amount of plants that could have fit if I had dug up the whole thing. No problem, I stuffed all those little plants into one quarter of the area that they actually needed. One month ago they all fit in real nice, all lined up like a real gardener had been there. However, since then it has rained, the temperature has gotten warmer, and our little plants have grown up. The peas are choking the corn, the beans have interwoven with the morning glories that I forgot grew along the fence, and the tomato plants are fighting for room, pushing out the pepper plants. As for those cucumbers, they need a hell of a lot more room than I gave them. I figure that within a couple of weeks the cucumbers will have taken over the whole thing. Seriously, they are growing so fast that if you stand there for any amount of time you will have to unwind them from your leg. So I don't know if we will have much of a crop this summer, and it does not matter. You see Mark seems to forget all about the things growing out in the yard. Last year I was giving away tomatoes to all the neighbors, while Mark kept bringing home tomatoes from the supermarket.