Summer's First Bounty

They spring up this time of year, seemingly overnight.  Zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, maybe some misshapen bell peppers.  Nope, I'm not talking about the garden.  I'm talking about produce at the office.
Every place I've worked at in my adult life has collection spots where food converges.  Often this is leftover food from meetings, with clear indications of what people do not like.  But this time of year, vegetables start to sprout up that were brought in from home.

Gardens start out with good intentions, but painfully don't meet even meager intentions.  More often, the most anticipated fare is coaxed into producing only a few delectable morsels while the general haul is filled with far too much of some other edible that begins to take on weed status, crowding all others out.

"Seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and Playboy combined." - Michael Perry

Someday nobody will remember what an Enron is and will have to read on Wikipedia to be reminded.
My 2011 garden was my last really ambitious one.  In what can only be described as exceedingly poor planning, I created that garden just outside of the reach of the closest garden hose.  I also started many of my plants in peat containers that I failed to heed the directions and rip the bottom off of when planting outside.  Between the subsequent poor root growth, questionable clay soil, difficulty watering, incessant invasion by weeds and rabbits, and my general laziness, that 2011 garden produced basically nothing.  A big garden seems like a good idea on those cool spring afternoons, but weeding takes on a hateful attitude in July's heat and humidity.  That 2011 location just out of reach of the garden hose has now been reenlisted to general lawn duty.  Not that the lawn is that much better than the garden, but it doesn't come with the same sense of acute failure every time I look at it.  I'm content with the chronic sense of failure that the lawn elicits.

More recently, the flower beds have been reenlisted for garden duty.  SO had the great idea to employ landscaping fabric and mulch, also using much sturdier garden stakes that can actually hold up to a tomato plant.  Regardless of one's belief in mixing flowers and produce plants, the beds look as good as they ever have.
Three of the four tomato plants are producing well.  The small sweet red cherry tomatos are great for drive-by eating.  The medium Cherokee Purples have grown to unexpected proportions.  The larger Cherokee Purples are overlaiden with green fruit - oddly warped in a way that only heirloom vegetables can be proud of.

I impulsively planted seeds taken from store-bought Kumatos.  Only one sprouted, and I discarded the rest only to see that dumping them may have been premature as new sprouts were evident a short time later.  Perhaps that was prescient; so far the Kumato plant has happily created copious flowers, but not a single fruit.  I am beginning to suspect that Syngenta has played some gene warfare game on Kumatos.  And I thought eugenics had been discarded in Europe?
In a fit of depression, the one lone pumpkin plant appears to have committed suicide.  Sad to see life cut so short when it had so much more to live for.

Someone's garden cucumbers showed up at work last week.  I've never understood why "burpless" cucumbers were marketed until I ate one of those gratis cucumbers over the next few days.  Yes it was tasty ... the first time.  Since they sell burpless varieties, I'm now searching for where the burps go.  There must be a cucumber variety sold as super burpy - there is a market, however niche, for everything!

I have contemplated in the past bringing a durian in to work and placing it at the food location.  It would be interesting to see the reaction of those who know what it is, as they recoil in horror and wonder where it came from, compared to those who have never been exposed to it and wonder what to do with it.  Cutting into it at work may result in new rules for office-appropriate food.

Summer will soon give way to fall and more overripe vegetables that seem to whither and rot within the time span of a work day.  November 1 will eventually arrive, when leftover Halloween candy pushes away anything healthy and green in the office food spot.  The candy disappears quickly.  Except those few hard candies with partially open wrappers or broken lemon suckers, which seem to linger until they are mercifully discarded.