Food From The Jungle

My aunt sent me an email Saturday titled "Food from the Jungle". Their garden does indeed look like a jungle.
They live in zone 6, so I think they are usually two weeks ahead me on blooms and frosts. I don't know how they even got in that garden to pick anything, but they did. Look at their harvest.

I thought my harvest on Sunday was pretty good, too. After all, I had to get an extra bowl for the beans and a second basket for the peppers.
But my harvest is sadly lacking in tomatoes. There are just a few smaller tomatoes and some cherry tomatoes down under those peppers. I had previously picked six or seven tomatoes and briefly thought when I took pictures of this harvest that I should get those tomatoes to add to the picture to make it look a bit more tomatoe-y and balanced. But it would be wrong to make my harvest appear like something it's not, just to compete with my aunt's harvest. After all, gardening isn't a competitive sport, is it? And I couldn't compete with that tomato harvest, anyway.

While I was out in my garden on Sunday, I saw the rabbit again. I was sweet and nice to Mr. Rabbit because it seemed he wasn't really affecting my harvest all that much. I've already picked ten bowls of green beans, more than I've picked in the last ten years combined! As long as I get plenty from my garden for ME and don't really know what I'm missing that the rabbit is eating, I'm happy to co-exist with it in my version of a garden jungle.

Which brings me to this evening. I went to the garden to check for tomatoes and found three that were ripe and ready to pick. They look good, don't they? The one on the lower left is my favorite variety 'German Johnson'.
But they are not good. The rabbit had been eating two of them.I caught him in the garden again this evening and scared him off before I realized he had been eating tomatoes. When I saw those half eaten tomatoes, I picked them with the intention of throwing them at the rabbit.

But I paused to think it through. If I threw the tomatoes, I'd probably miss and they would make a mess when they went splat on the fence. So I decided to chase the rabbit away. He ran the long way around the yard before he escaped, so I ran the long way, too. Yes, gardening is good aerobic exercise, especially when you chase after rabbits. (I just hope the neighbors weren't watching).

Then I took the two half eaten tomatoes and used them to bait my rabbit trap. If he likes tomatoes, let him eat them in the trap!

And this time when I catch him, and surely I will, he won't get away!

In the meantime, while I wait for more tomatoes to ripen and for the rabbit to enter the trap, I'm going to see if my aunt will send me all their secrets of growing tomatoes, all of them. Varieties, fertilizer, watering, caging versus staking, starting from seed, all their secrets. It's my heritage! I want to know!