Kirsten Vangsness

Also, your yield was three.

Maybe these vegetables underwent a kind of spontaneous genetic mutation in your garden, and you invented a whole new strains of wee food.

Maybe you could sell them to some researcher at MIT to study.

Maybe the nut-sized cucumbers could be marketed as a cocktail snack.

Cashew Cukes?

Face it.

Your garden is filled with the vegetable equivalent of failure to thrive infants.

It hurts to look at them.

But you cared for them.

You fortified the dirt with huge sacks of very expensive, loamy soil from Maine, so heavy that you pulled a muscle lugging them from your car.

You lovingly watered every day, and yet, here they are, puny and stunted.

Those vegetables that are not puny are non-existent.

Like good for you to have tried your luck with artichokes, very adventurous.

And whoa, those leaves are two feet long and spiky, just like the pictures online.

You've been Googling photos of artichokes to see where the artichokes are supposed to be.

On top of a stalk in the middle of all the spiky leaves.

But you put your face right down in there and there's no stalk.

So the artichokes were a bust.

Why are you so negative?

Your tomato harvest was a success.