Things We Can Eat

It’s the end of the summer and beginning of fall here in the northern hemisphere, and that means gardens are blowing up with fruit and vegetables.

Owners of smaller homes often have big challenges finding space for gardens — with small oddly shaped lots and strange sun exposure. So plants often get squeezed into front yards or wedged alongside alleys.

This garden got squeezed into a spot about six feet by ten feet on a plot along our back alley.

V E G E T A B L E S !

Further up the alley these people built a series of cages for their T O M A T O E S !

A close up of the O.

You’ll see all kinds of vegetables, like pumpkins and gourds grown in front yards to take advantage of sun that gets blocked by backyard trees.

Peppers, eggplants, greens, herbs, and even hops are grown where there’s space.

Fruit

And then there is the fruit*. Our yard doesn’t get enough sun for vegetables aside from a few greens, but we can grow figs. Here you can see one that is still ripening and the remains of another that was gutted by birds.

You can also see in gardens this time of year things like grapes, raspberries, and passion fruit, which it turns out can survive all the way to Zone 5 in the US with some TLC.

*The old pedantry “tomato is a fruit not a vegetable” is banned here. IT IS BANNED!

It’s a mistake as dumb as saying “spinach is a leaf not a vegetable” or “sole is a dish served in France not a fish.” Under the botanical classification system tomatoes are fruit, but when it comes to food tomatoes are a vegetable. Things can exist in multiple classification systems at the same time, and terms don’t need to be consistent. This isn’t coding. END OF RANT.