🌱 Weeds, Heatwaves & The Big Sad™: A Garden Update That Wasn’t Folklore Wednesday (But Still Counts)

So, who’s up for a semi-out-of-the-blue Wednesday Garden update?

Okay, okay- I know today is supposed to be Folklore Wednesday. And yes, I had every intention of sitting down to prep a queer folklore post (because y’all know I wanted to do a whole miniseries for Pride Month). But instead, your favorite disabled cryptid author just kinda sat at the back table, birdwatching in the miserable heat and feeling The Big Sad™ yesterday instead.

Today had to get spent on the more important things in life- food pantry, and gardening. Because… the weeds are overtaking.

Don’t worry though- that Folklore Wednesday post is still coming. Maybe not this week, maybe not even this month. But I am queer and disabled 24/7/365, so I write about the things I love all year round.

You know what doesn’t stick around all year in Illinois, though? The garden.

I haven’t been able to bring you nearly as many garden updates as I’d hoped, thanks to the whiplash weather and heatwaves that feel like they were designed by a vengeful sun god. As y’all know, we planted a few days after Mother’s Day, and if you need a refresher, here’s what we’ve got growing in this year’s chaos patch:

• Tomatoes (roma, slicer, sweetheart, and yellow grape)
• Sweet bell peppers (red, yellow, green- like a stoplight)
• Zucchini (classic green + cocozelle a.k.a. the fancy stripey one)
• Yellow straightneck squash
• Vining cucumbers (RIP to our bush cucumbers, the first loss of the season)
• Jalapeños
• Bush green beans
• Sugar snap peas
• Radishes
• Rhubarb
• Yarrow, burdock, wild carrot
• Cantaloupes & watermelons
• Raspberry bushes
• An elderberry bush (status: dramatic and possibly deceased- though when one finds it for a $2.00 in the clearance realm of a Meijer… can you be surprised?)
• Italian parsley, asparagus, garlic chives, traditional chives, purple flowering chives
• Dill, chamomile, cilantro
• …and a partridge in a pear tree, basically. Speaking of trees, I reeeaaaally want an apple tree.

Now, despite the heat keeping us mostly indoors, when we did get out to water the other night, it looked like our entire garden had been taken hostage. Weeds. Everywhere. Prickly, grassy, stabbity chaos. Grass in the beds. Weird spiny things lurking like unwanted garden gremlins. It was bad- I could almost hear my grandmother screaming from the garden gnome shaped cookie jar we put her ashes in when we got her back from the funeral home.

(Don’t judge, she loved Halloween as much as I do, 99.99% of the witchy stuff you see in the house was hers first, and when we saw the gnome cookie jar, we settled for that since we couldn’t find a witchy enough urn in time. She was also the one who got me gardening- and she loved gnomes so…)

But- silver lining? That overgrown mess may have actually protected some of our plants from the worst of the heat. When we finally got down to business during today’s cooler spell (while dinner was in the oven, obviously), we discovered bright yellow flowers blooming on the cucumber’s vines. A literal win.

We managed to clean out most of the garden beds, but the tomato zone still needs some love. Same with the zucchini and squash- both of which were being attacked by some demonic almost foot-tall nightmare weed that could stab through even the good gardening gloves. We’ve narrowed it down to either burnweed or bull thistle. However, I 100% plan to run it through Google Lens tomorrow, and see if we can’t get a definitive name for the spiky bastard.

Either way? I hate it.

Tomorrow’s forecast is calling for light rain, which would be a blessing. We even had what my grandma called a “sunshower” today- rain falling while the sun’s still out like a weird little weather glitch. But it was a happy memory nonetheless.

So, here’s the plan: finish clearing out the last boxes. Maybe sprinkle in a little more love- and the crushed eggshells we’ve got hanging out in the window. The garden deserves to be healthy. I deserve that too so, we take it one day at a time, and try to give ourselves grace when and where we can. Right?

And hey- if I end up skipping another Folklore Wednesday to write about chives and trauma gardening instead… I know y’all will understand. 💚

I hope you’re staying cool, hydrated, and being kind to yourselves.

-Sky, The Crippled Cryptid.

linktr.ee/skylanarissa