Well, okay - God created it. BUT I HELPED!
Check this out:

See that little yellow flower, there? That’s going to be a freaking TOMATO! There are a whole bunch more on the same plant.
See, I’ve been so busy with life and all its appertaining craziness of late - almost all of it good - that I forgot to tell you all about my garden. After Sam ate my first batch of plants (remember that?), I was discouraged but not defeated. I ordered new seeds from Organica Seed and Seed Savers, and I started anew, in adorable little IKEA pots in my kitchen.
Then, do you want to know what happened? All my plants but one were stricken by some awful fungus and died. Seriously, it was quick, too - I left for work and they were fine. I came home from lunch and they were all laying over, wilted, like someone had let the air out of them.
This guy survived, and I’m so proud of him:

Someday soon he’s going to be providing my household with delicious heirloom Marglobe tomatoes. Yummy!
See, a couple weeks ago I decided it was now or never; I had to get this garden started, to coin a phrase. So I got out the old rototiller that I’ve somehow inherited from my dad. It was quite the testosterone rush, let me tell you, throwing that thing down and coming up with dirt. Quite the rush indeed. I immediately wanted to go build things and have sex. But that’s another story.
I got new seed flats - I’m using peat pellets this time to start my seeds. But also, I’ve been reading a lot of gardening books, especially The Seed Starters Guide, and I decided that I needed to give my seeds even more support. So, I went to Target and bought a shelf, and to Lowe’s, where I bought four grow lights and some zip ties. I attached the lights to the underside of the shelves with the zip ties, and kablammo! Grow shelves! Now my neighbors can all think I’m growing weed!
But I’m not. I’m growing purple opal basil.

And cherry tomatoes:

And cantaloupes:

I’ve also got some cucumbers, yellow strawberries, bolivian rainbow peppers, dill, carrots, Calabrese broccoli, Ailsa Craig onions, and white bush beans under those grow lights. It’s all going crazy. The beans got so big after just a week that they had to be moved to the lower shelf, with some tomato plants that my buddy Jaye brought me:

The cool thing is, that’s not even all of them! Wednesday night after work there was a thunderstorm coming, and I wanted to get as much of this in the ground as possible. So, with lightning on 3 sides of us only 1-2 Mississippis away - gardening is occasionally an extreme sport, as it turns out - we put down a row of young tomato plants and a row of beans:

The hardest part, emotionally, was thinning out the superfluous seedlings from the peat pots. But some of them came up so easily, so completely and beautifully intact, that I couldn’t resist the urge to put some of them back down in pots to see how they did. And, with these 99-cent Home Depot clay pots, I did exactly that. So I ended up with a basil, dill, cucumber and cantaloupe plant each in its own pot:

So far the only thing that’s bearing a little fruit are the jalapenos, which I also bought from Home Depot because I was feeling impatient with waiting for seedlings to get started. One of them wilted a bit, because I inadvertently set the sprinkler too far away from it. It’s all recovered now, though, and it’s got 3 tiny little peppers on it, and its brother has even more than that:

These jalapenos are growing next to the 6 bell pepper plants I put down. I got bell peppers in orange, yellow, and red, because adding a variety of colors to your vegetable diet is very, very healthy and delicious and aesthetically pleasing. The bell peppers have had the hardest time so far, because we’ve been experiencing really high nighttime winds that have buffeted them quite a bit. I’m not completely sure how to help them out, but they do seem to be hardening off quite well on their own and even showing some new growth, which is always encouraging.
One last thing and then I’ll let you go. This is mint. I have two pots of it:

Next week I’m going to add mulch & compost to all this goodness, and probably put some more stuff in the ground.