Survivors

I went out into the garden yesterday to see how bad the damage was and rescue any survivors. I'm afraid my mission went from a rescue mission to a recovery mission pretty quickly. Almost everything is dead and some of the plants have just washed away. What's still in one piece is droopy, yellow and wet. It's a pretty sad state of affairs to be honest.

According to the local weather, our area got close to 14 inches of rain and overall the state of Florida got more rain than it did during Tropical Storm Faye - I think around 27 inches. It's also more rain than the state has ever received from a non-tropical system. So we set records left and right. The initial damage estimates are at $100 million dollars for the state. So I guess my flooded yard and ruined garden don't matter in the grand scheme of life, although in my little world it just plain sucks.

But on to the survivors. A couple of the younger tomato plants look like they might recover, but the established plants look like their time is numbered. I plucked any tomatoes that looked like they had a hint of red on them and left the green ones for another day. This is the stash that I recovered and placed on the patio to ripen.


It looks good until you have a closer look and realize most of them have completely split open and are inedible.


Why aren't the birds eating these tomatoes? Maybe their tiny little bird bellies are full from all the good tomatoes they snarfed down before the rains came.

There was one lone green bell pepper clinging to a soggy plant so I plucked it off and brought it inside. The other bell pepper plant is missing so I'm guessing it washed away.


My leeks that I've had a loving relationship with since October of last year are starting to droop, so I got nervous when I saw them. I pulled two of them out to see how they looked because I'm worried they all need to come out of my soil-soup. I yanked two of them out and they seem okay, but they were only the size of thick scallions.


I won't go into the list of what's dead in the post because this is all about the survivors. I won't talk about the dead pumpkins, beans, peas, cucumber, zucchini, cantaloupe or okra. I'll keep this post about my sick little harvest of survivors and show the death and destruction for a later post.