Two Bucks, or a Full-Time Job

I'm kind of bummed out today. I planted tomatoes, beans, and peppers. Of those items, tomatoes are the hardest to buy in any acceptable level of quality. In fact, it's just plain not possible to get them. And they were the only crops I was totally unable to grow. We have a thing now called Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl Virus, and it's spread by the whitefly, which is one of the commonest and hardest to kill bugs in existence, and your plant can get it from very few bites, and once you've got it, the plant is worthless.

I'm still trying to grow tomatoes, using as much poison as I dare, but I expect them to crap out again. But the peppers and beans worked out okay, and up until now, I've been feeling pretty good about that.

Over the past few weeks, I've been stringing my Kentucky Wonder beans on threads and hanging them to dry, to make shucky beans. And even though the harvest was small, I was feeling somewhat pleased. But the last time I went to the grocery, on a whim, I bought a giant bag of green beans for $2.39, and while I was stringing my own beans today, I strung those too. And looking at the result, I am fairly sure that I am going to get fine quality beans, in amounts approximating my total harvest to date. No spray, no digging, no picking, no weeding.

So I kind of think the whole bean effort may have been wasted. I'll know in a few weeks, when they dry out and I've eaten a few.

This would mean only the peppers were worth the aggravation.

I'm starting to think the only way to get tomatoes in South Florida now is to grow the damn things indoors. What a pain that would be. I'd need a light and a timer and a place to put the pots. And anything more than 3 pots would take up too much room.

I never thought I'd live in a world where something as ordinary as a good tomato was impossible to come by. And if the beans are a waste of time, what do I do with the bed I prepared for them? I guess I can stick herbs and peppers in it, but how many peppers can I realistically use?

Maybe it's time to give up and plant something ordinary and reliable, like bananas.