The Coffee Cup Garden

What is a coffee cup garden?

1) Is it a beautiful place where you sit on a bench surrounded by foliage to enjoy a cup of freshly brewed coffee in the wee hours of the morning, during that peaceful part of the day before it gets all screwed up?

NO.

2) Is it a ceramic mug with tomatoes, cucumbers and beans painted on it and a handle that looks just like a carrot?

NOPE.

3) Could it be a miniature banzai garden, grown in a coffee cup and set on your table as a centerpiece?

NOT EXACTLY.

Do you  remember how it all started?

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Sven dug up that old dirt while I pretended to be looking for another shovel.

Then there was that glorious day when we discovered, Not Betty, our first little girl tomato hanging on the vine and it looked like my plan to blog about our foiled garden was going to be foiled because things were actually sprouting.

And then all those rumors started going around that we were going to become vegetable snobs and that I would be bringing in the surplus to work when we couldn't possibly can another thing and put up a sign that says, FREE.

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[one_half_last][/one_half_last] That's not how it went down. However we did end up with enough tomatoes to top off a pan of tuna burgers. I took this picture to prove it to all of you naysayers.  I think you know who you are. We also ate a couple of B.L.T.s. with delicious slices of Millie and Sven tomatoes.  You'll just have to take my word on that because Sven was starting to get huffy. He doesn't like it when I snap too many pictures, especially when he's trying to eat. You know, I can remember back when Sven and I used to argue about exciting things.  Things like, who gets the top, who's going to turn out the light and who's going to let the dog in. I wouldn't have believed you if you would have told me that one day we would be arguing about tomatoes. But when fresh tomatoes are sparse they become gold.  And I needed four tomatoes as part of the ingredients to make a batch of gazpacho. Sven doesn't happen to like gazpacho too much.  He thinks soup should be hot.  I happen to love gazpacho.  I think it tastes just like summer in a bowl with lots of garlic.  He looked over at our four tomatoes that were sitting on the counter and then he looked at me standing next to them with the blender and in an accusatory tone he said, "You're not planning to use those tomatoes to make gazpacho are you?" And I said, "No." See how we fight?  It gets pretty ugly. Fortunately my friend gave me a bag of tomatoes the very next day because she had so many that they were coming out of her ass and I was able to make the gazpacho after all.  But what Sven doesn't know is that I used the only two cucumbers that had been growing in the garden all summer. If you put them both together they were almost as big as one. And, I suppose you have all been wondering..................

"What ever happened with the beets?"

Well, the beets that we didn't accidentally kill by pulling out too soon and then stuffed back into the ground, ended up in the steamer. I know you shouldn't judge a beet by it's color, but I would like to know why some are purple and some are white?

Beets me.

  Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Sadly enough, Pete the Pepper was never found after that horrific day when Typhoon Sven came through and blew him out of the garden.  In case you didn't hear about it, here are some clips from our local paper.

That was a wild storm. But the deck turned out real nice.

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And for all you folks who don't know what the heck kohlrabi is......................

I've got to say..................

I don't either.

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[one_half_last][/one_half_last] I pulled them all out of the garden and get this, the only thing that was under the ground were the roots.  Apparently you're supposed to eat the part on the stem that bulges out and looks like a stunted ball of cabbage.  In our case only one stem bulged out at all and Sven said he wasn't going to bother with those real skinny ones. I wasn't about to argue with him because he was making dinner that night and the recipe said to peel the skin off the kohlrabi and the butternut squash and that didn't sound like much fun.  The butternut came from Piggly Wiggly, because sadly enough even after Typhoon Sven destroyed all the squash bugs that had been sucking the guts out of our squash, it was too little, too late. The squash didn't get much bigger than the cucumbers.

Remember Jack and the Beanstalk and the giant? Yeah, well that has nothing to do with this.

The kohlrabi dinner was delicious.

Other than the kohlrabi, I would highly recommend it.

So now the only thing left for us to do is to take the surplus to work and give it away.

 

 And this my friends, is a Coffee Cup Garden.