Monday thoughts and gardening adventures

Thanks to my readers who identified the tall, scraggly plants in my flowerbed. They are Liatris, also knows as Blazing Star. It's actually a wildflower, so I guess that's why I thought it looked like a weed; many wildflowers are considered as weeds. I'll be glad when mine actually make some flowers like the ones in the picture, because right now they're pretty hideous.

The okra is looking fantastic; I should have plenty to put in the freezer for use in gumbo, soups, and stews. This is another plant that's easy to grow. It loves heat and drought, but will take the rain if it comes. It really doesn't have a lot of pests that bother it; I lightly dusted these plants with Sevin when I was out there yesterday because some small holes had been nibbled in the leaves, but it wouldn't have been necessary.
In spite of all the bug damage you can see on the leaves of my Savoy cabbage, so far the heads seem to be developing well.

This is todays harvest: Yes, the cucumbers are tiny; but we eat them like this, skin and all, knowing that within four days we'll have more cucumbers than we can even give away.

Cliff and I had a discussion this morning about the famous people who die too young from drugs abused and mis-used. I told him about the application on Facebook called "Farm Town". You start out with a tiny patch of ground and a few coins. You can buy seeds and plant them and sell the harvest, and eventually make enough coins to buy more land, a house, barns, and so forth. The game was highly addictive and great fun for me, until I finally had the biggest house and the best barn that coins could buy. I kept planting more crops, but now there was nothing left I really wanted to buy.

The other day I accidentally deleted the application, and I realized I didn't care. The game had become boring because I had 300,000 coins, and nothing left that I wanted to buy; I had everything I could possibly accumulate. I discussed this on Facebook with a longtime Internet friend, Kelly. She said, "Wouldn't it be great if real life was like that?" What she meant was, wouldn't it be nice to get everything you want and still have more money than you can spend?

That's when it hit me: real life is like that. That's why M. J. and Elvis and Janis Joplin and so many others have ended up dying meaningless deaths, far too soon. There was nowhere else for them to go, nothing else to do. They had done it all.