Waiting for the plague

Loyal Green Line Garden readers Kristin and Carl were in town this past week, offering unsolicited admiration for our gardening exploits. Yes, we're fortunate to have more space than the average Brooklynite -- but our stuff is also growing like gangbusters. I spent Monday wrangling tomato plants that have now completely taken over the raised bed, trellising them a third time this season already. And these are cherry tomato plants.

Things are going well here. The four basil plants I planted could provide pesto for an entire Italian village, the tomatoes are the size of small trees, and even the lame-ass cilantro finally is making a strong showing above ground. There's a dahlia the size of my (very large) head over in the flower bed. We could bring three bags of lettuce and herbs to our friends Will and Lucy's house over the weekend and still have a bag, plus three uncultivated heads, waiting at home. Just walk by our house and we'll force something on you.

Still, we're waiting for the other shoe to drop. We joked at lunch with Kristin and Carl that the swarm of locusts, or stink bugs, would descend imminently and put an end to our beginners' luck. I've seen exactly one Japanese beetle and one stink bug in the yard and instantly, think, ok, now it starts -- even after I've killed the bastards. The sight of finches adorably searching for nesting material on Monday morning, stubbornly tugging on the metal mesh around the higher raised bed, made me think, "next time, they come for the tomatoes."

I am legitimately worried that we are facing a systemic problem in the lack of bees I've seen around the now plentiful tomato and pepper flowers. The zinnias and cosmos in the flower bed and the marigolds directly in front of the vegetables are not drawing them in, if they are floating around the city at all. It just seems like we should have more fruit at this point.