Fruits and Vegetables!

"Nice fresh fruits and vegetables / make you feel so free."
Shonen Knife, Fruits and Vegetables

The plants have begun to bear fruits (and vegetables)!

These fruits and vegetables are both nice and fresh, though none is yet edible.

It will shock no one that the outdoor vegetables are thriving most; every plant has at least one product on display. The tomatoes lead the way with lots of both varieties (pear tomatoes and cherry tomatoes) in various stages of ripeness:

The cucumber, however, takes the prize for sheer vegetable mass (not surprising given its propensity for taking over its pot). In addition to one behemoth, there are many mini-cukes in the works. Here's the behemoth, with burgeoning eggplant and an eggplant blossom for scale:

And speaking of mini, the cucumber's pot-mates, the jalapeño and the eggplant, each have little more than a shiny little ball ballooning where a flower used to be. The jalapeño is an appropriately edgy dark green, the eggplant a creamy white (the norm for its variety).

Inside, the tomatoes have grown taller than me, and only the cherry has blossomed. But it is blossoming quite enthusiastically, and my cotton-swab pollination seems to have worked in at least one instance. Yes, we have our first indoor tomato!

The mint and basil continue to remain wildly productive as well, and the basil lent itself to a delicious caprese dinner the other night. Here's the mint forest:

We are thrilled with all this success. And yet... The leafy greens remain, surprisingly, something of an enigma. Yes, I harvested some collards (raw, they taste like brussels sprouts!) and spinach to accompany a dinner last week, and yes they were delicious sautéed with mustard and a little (Niman Ranch) bacon, but then again, what wouldn't be delicious sautéed with mustard and bacon? More importantly, though, why do they seem to be the least happy of our botanical charges? The outdoor arugula and spinach bolted very quickly despite my (admittedly inconsistent) attempts to keep their tops clipped and send their energy into delicious leaf production. The collards seem to have stopped growing altogether. The surviving indoor greens have fully recovered from their cat attack and are currently resting in sequestration, healthy but also not perceptibly growing. I'll have to do some reading to find out how to coax more leaves from these willful little creatures.

In any event, just having nice fresh fruits (tomatoes!) and vegetables (jalapeño! eggplant!) in the works, even if they're not yet ready for consumption, does make me feel so free. Hopefully within the next couple of weeks, we will be free from the necessity of eating primarily the sorts of fruits and vegetables that we saw growing in the fields of California earlier this month. In particular, that one little indoor tomato growing next to our dining room table reminds me, to quote the great chaotician Ian Malcolm, that (even in a city apartment) "life finds a way." (I just re-watched childhood favorite Jurassic Park; forgive the reference.)