Yes, that's right. My landlord installed a water faucet on my side of the house! No more hauling water from my second floor apartment down to the garden. Also? I could get Ivan a kiddie pool! It might be a bit late for this summer, but we will see. For next summer, definitely.
Speaking of the garden, here it is:
It is very green and leafy, but not much has been flowering. The actual flowers (cosmos, echinacea, gomphrena, nasturtiums, black-eyed susans) have had minimal blooms. Vegetables have faired only slightly better. My pepper plants had some late flowers after a rough bug-eaten start, and have a couple of baby peppers on them. My beans have done pretty well, and so have the herbs. My cucumbers have been flowering extravagantly, but the fruits on them look awfully prickly, curly, and thin. Weird.
The tomatoes are the big mystery. The plants themselves are doing fairly well, despite only getting 4-5 hours of direct sun per day. They finally - maybe in late July? - had some flowers. Now a few of them have some tiny green fruits. My landlord's tomatoes - planted just on the other side of our house, and getting only slightly more sun than mine - are going gangbusters: tons of big, red, juicy tomatoes.
My next door neighbor, whose garden is almost next to mine, said that he also has had barely any tomatoes whatsoever this year, despite having successfully grown tomatoes in that same spot for thirty years. He claims the problem is chipmunks, but I am not so sure...
