Cindy's breast cancer came back late last summer in a very aggressive form called Inflammatory Breast Cancer. As the disease progressed, it became more difficult for her to get out into the garden to attend to things. By late August she had harvested and frozen the tomatoes and the beets. The pole beans ran rampant; she harvested as many of those as she could, but many of the bean pods remained on the vines.
Our friend Janet came over one day in September to help me pull out the bean stalks. We pulled off as many of the pods as we could and Cindy sat at the table on the patio shelling them, but we knew some of the seeds had escaped into the soil.
Cindy died in early December, during what passes for a rainy season here. Without her time and attention, the garden began to go wild. There were three foot tall dandelions growing in her raised vegetable beds; whitefly had attacked the dwarf tangerine and lemon trees in the pots in the driveway, and I was too busy and too overwhelmed to do anything about it.
One day a gardening neighbor called and asked if we had a wheelbarrow she could borrow. She came down to look at our garden cart; while she was here, she pulled some of the huge dandelions for her chickens, who apparently think they're a special treat.
A few weeks later I pulled some more of the dandelions and took them down for the chickens. While I was there, she showed me the raised bed her son had started for growing veggies. Last summer Cindy had shown him her anti-varmint system of plexiglass and hardware cloth panels. He had tried to duplicate that system in his beds, but because plexiglass is in such great demand due to the Covid-19 pandemic, he wasn't able to get enough plexiglass to enclose his beds and the critters were feasting on his veggies.
I suggested they use our set up to plant their veggies, since the panels and irrigation were all in place, so they came over, pulled all the weeds and planted eggplant, kale and other things. I showed them the small cages Cindy had made from hardware cloth and electrical ties, so they used some of those to protect the plants from airborne veggie munchers. Some of the rogue pole bean seeds had sprouted in the bed, and they carefully put tomato cages around for the vines to climb even though I warned them that the beans will take over the space.
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