My poor garden's looking the worse for wear at this point in the season. It's time to start considering which plants are going into the compost pile this weekend. The traitorous eggplant is a top contender.

I went out this morning to check on things, and harveted an overflowing handful of grape tomatoes. My head swam with plans for when I'd dry this batch to give me more oven dried tomatoey goodness, when a combination of wet wood, clumsiness, and sheer bad luck caused me to take a spill and crush most of them. Sadness! Despair! I managed to salvage a few, and then grabbed some Black Cherries, but I feel robbed of the good stuff.

The rest of the garden is obviously slowing down. None of the Husky Reds has ripened since I picked the last one a week or two ago. My third cucumber apparently offed itself when I failed to water properly last week. There are two smallish banana peppers on the vine. The other hot peppers are still growing like weeds. Only, you know, hotter. And slightly more colorful. The greens need to be thinned, so I'm thinking we'll be having a salad with the trimmings this weekend. My sugar snap peas, once so happy and carefree, have become angry and defensive after being continuously ravaged by some creature, and haven't given me any tasty treats. And of course, I never managed to get another round of carrots and radishes in the "ground," after their unfortunate run-in with the neighbors' dog.

I've started reading "Square Foot Gardening" to see if it would work for me next year. Here come the daydreams about lovely lush lawns punctuated with prim white boxes filled with lucious green.