c. creativity: life in macro: Harvesting Photos: The Garden

Tomato harvest.

While my backyard is a great place to photograph birds, it is a terrible place to grow vegetables. Once upon a time, about 25 years ago, there was enough sunlight for a garden, but the trees got bigger and bigger and the patches of sun got smaller and smaller. For a while, my family had a CSA farm share, which led to a lot of bok choy and kohlrabi stir fries. (Yuck!) But for more than a half dozen years now, my family has had a plot in one community garden or another down in the valley near my house that has great soil and abundant sunshine. We typically grow four varieties of tomatoes (Sungold cherry tomatoes are a favorite), two or three kinds of beans, multiple varieties of lettuce, Swiss chard, kale, zucchini, some type of cucumber, fennel, radishes, beets, green onions, and garlic, as well as occasional crops of acorn squash (a revelation) and other winter squashes, potatoes (they've never been a great success), bell peppers (ditto), and eggplant (a lot of work because they need to be well-protected from cold). We've had an unusually warm and sunny summer, so our tomato plants have been prolific: we've harvested 18 pounds of various tomatoes over the last two weeks! My other homegrown favorite, aside from the Sungold cherry tomatoes, are the green beans. I'm an expert bean picker (though bean plants will make your arms itch!) and a pretty darn good bean eater, too. Truth be told, though, my involvement in making things grow is minimal. When I head out to the community garden, it's always with my camera, where I stalk the plots looking for beautiful produce and interesting insects while others do the actual gardening. Here are some of my favorite photos: