The vegetable garden.

When you plant a vegetable garden, you have high hopes and great expectations. You can taste those red ripe tomatoes as you're digging the hole for the fledgling plant.... your mind is writing salt and butter on your shopping list at the very second those tiny corn kernels go into the ground. You look at that garden patch first thing every morning and last thing before dark. Who cares how heavy that hose is..... you drag it over to where you need it so those baby plants can get all the water they need.

As my dad would have said: Baloney!

About six months ago, my cousin F sent us a beautiful book on gardening in Texas.... everything we could possibly want to know, and then some, about planting flowers and vegetables in each corner of this state. All sorts of flowering annuals and perennials to make the landscape bright and colorful..... every variety of fruit and vegetable that would make my grocery list shorter and my kitchen counter bloom with just-picked dew-licked freshness.

Once again: Baloney!

The reality of gardening..... you coddle those plants and look after them carefully, you water them and feed them and make sure the soil has the correct nutrients. The plants grow tall and green, they thrive with ripening fruits and vegetables. And then, just when you can taste those just-picked zucchini and the fresher-than-fresh corn...... the raccoons come out. These night-time creatures bring with them a few skunks, an armadillo or two, and maybe a possum tossed in for good measure. And, just to make sure that the parsley and basil and oregano plants don't get lonely, the raccoons invite about 1,439 fat green and black caterpillars which will eat those herbs from stem to leaf and then back again to make sure that nothing was missed.

About the only vegetable that has found its way to the basket on the kitchen counter is the tomato... two here, three here...... there always seems to be a tomato or two growing on one of the four plants out there. The plants themselves are six feet high, but the tomatoes didn't get as large as we thought they would.... but each one was delicious.

The zucchini..... we haven't eaten one of those, because the raccoons and the skunks beat us to them. The little zucchini never grew longer than the length of my index finger... they were eaten up (along with the sweet zucchini flowers) in their infancy.

The green beans..... I think I've picked about 15 beans. I did cook them up, and they were very good. The local farmer's market sells green beans for about 50 cents a pound, however, so the green beans weren't worth the trouble. It took more time to make sure the little tendrils were wrapping themselves around the wire fence as they grew. The plants look very pretty out there.... lots of green leaves, hardly any green beans.

The strawberries.... we picked about 26 of them. A basket-full.....! No way. The strawberries got ripe one berry at a time, one day at a time. As we picked them, we cut them in half and shared each one. Not exactly strawberry fields forever.

The corn...... ah..... the corn. The raccoons, with help from the skunks, no doubt, got mostly all of our corn. My husband did catch one raccoon in the trap, and he drove it to the next town and released it near the lake there. Lake-front living for that particular raccoon... and fresh corn is again on my shopping list.

The parsley, oregano, basil...... I planted those three herbs because I need them for the zucchini pie recipe. I had been picking from each of those plants for the past month or so.... till those pretty green caterpillars discovered our garden patch. At first, I was finding just one or two caterpillars. I picked them off, still attached to the stem they were munching on, and tossed them out into the pasture. But they kept coming back, bringing with them dozens of their closest friends. Too many to pick off and toss out into the pasture. I just gave up, and let them have their way with the herb plants. On my shopping list: parsley, oregano, basil.

The eggplants... those plants went into the ground way after all the others had a good start. The eggplant plants are growing taller now, spreading green leaves this way and that, and within a few weeks, they should be mature enough to start sprouting little purple eggplants. I have no doubt that when the little eggplants appear on those stalks, there will be a raccoon sitting in the vegetable patch with a fork in one paw and a jar of Paul Newman's Marinara Sauce in the other paw. Dinner is served.

....... E - I - E - I - O.......