Mary, Mary quite contrary - how does your garden grow?

 It is quite satisfying to make a soup using every single last vegie in the fridge that is on the edge of becoming compost.  Lately, I have been hell bent on cutting out any wastefulness and that goes double for food.  My freezer has become a stockpile of everything from bread on the brink, a mistakenly doubled recipe for pumpkin pasta sauce to chinese takeout.  The on-edge soup will eventually find a place within the confines of fake tupperware piled atop the General Tsai chicken or the languishing pumpkin sauce.

While chopping away at the soup ingredients and tossing them into the pot, I marveled at the nature occurring just beyond my back door out on the deck.  This summer I decided to grow some food.  I have grown food before, albeit a long time ago.  None the less, I am a very accomplished indoor gardener, and felt ready to take on the task of container food gardening.  I was fairly successful.  I grew a red bell pepper plant that produced three good sized specimens, two Royal Purple bean plants of which I got several handfuls of pretty purple green beans and a tomato plant, which was cheating because it came from from Trader Joe's with little green tomatoes already on it.  At any rate I was out on the deck earlier today with the plan to empty the pots and get them off the deck, when I noticed a tiny bell pepper. Do pepper plants continue to fruit? I didn't know, but when I turned to grab the tomato pot, several little flowers were blooming all over it! Delightful! Does this mean I'll be munching fresh vegies in February?

I don't know if it's the beautiful autumn weather, or being in the kitchen cooking up a cozy soup or what, but it got me thinking about how easy and satisfying it is to take care of plants. I thought about that saying, how relationships are like gardens - you just have to pay attention to them and they'll grow.  I think that's bullshit. Because I thought I was nurturing: pruning them with phone calls and emails, watering them with hikes, lunches, dinner parties and feeding them with love. I have taken very good care of my friendships and have still managed to lose two just this year.

This may have something to do with being in my 50's...