The problem that I have found with intensive gardening techniques is that eventually everything grows into one big tangled mass of vegetable matter. For instance, my cucumbers should have had a trellis (lesson learned for next spring), and so they began roaming everywhere. They quickly infiltrated the Blue Lake Bush Beans, but have since been overwhelmed themselves by the yellow squash and the tomatillos (which have NO SENSE of personal space). The corn evidently felt left out of the whole experience so it has begun covering over all of the previously mentioned plants with several random, falling stalks (stupid corn!). All of them grew over my puny 1 foot pathways like they didn’t exist and so there are portions of the garden that are VERY difficult to get to unless you have 6 foot long legs and can tip toe like a ballerina.
That being said, every morning I am out there poking and prodding, shifting, lifting, and moving vines, leaves, stalks, and limbs trying to find ripe and ready fruit.
Somehow… I missed this one until this morning.
This is SUPPOSED to be a pickling cucumber. However, it is now way to big and way to ripe for that. It weighed in this morning at a solid one pound and feels a bit like one of those miniature footballs.
I’ll see if I can convince the chickens to eat it tomorrow after I dice it up.
The jungle should be a little calmer in a couple of days. My corn is due. I’ve checked the ears. They’re awful. It looks like a total loss which is very frustrating, but… I will enjoy ripping them out of the ground. Mwahahahaha!
The Jones Garden Blog 
Lol, I try to train some of my more encroaching vegetables, using sticks to guide squash vines where I want them to be, growing cucumbers and the smaller squash (cobnut and butternut for example :)) upwards and across but there is always one that manages to break out of confinement and try to take over the garden. Even the potato plants like to spill over and invade the space of their neighbours and so I’ve taken to building a corral around them using wool and bamboo canes 🙂
BTW i’m not sure if this comment will post because for some reason, yesterday Akismet decided that I was spam and keeps dumping my comments into the spam folders of people I regularly post comments on. Apologies if this actually posts as a comment but I needed to put the above to explain why I may possibly end up in your spam folder!
Plants are so much easier than technology …… 🙂
I saw the post on your blog about spam and checked my folder. Sure enough… this comment was in there, as were other legit comments. Thanks for pointing out the issue.
And thanks for the recommendations. I’ve never tried to train squash vines before… and I tend to plant too many too close. Probably a bad combination.
And as an engineer, I can tell you for certain, plants are much easier and much more fun than technology!
I don’t take too much notice of spacings either and just make sure everything has copious amounts of water and regular feeds – seems to work 🙂
I have a sweet potato plant that wants to take over the world. I know what you mean.
This is the first year for my sweet potatoes. They are just starting to make a run at domination. It seems that they really like the heat. Interesting vines.
I like the idea of cramming as much in as possible. You sound as if you have a lovely and tasty jungle out there! The cucumber looks like a squash – hope the chickens like it.
They loved it!
It is partly the time of year. The days are at their longest, and plants have hours and hours to grow at the very time the heat slows us down. I’m up for our five AM dawn, and often out in the cool of the sunset, but at mid day I often can be found taking a siesta and snoring. Plants, however, do not take siestas.
I’m jealous of all who have things they actually planted competing with each other. My main problem is things I didn’t plant; IE: dreaded weeds.
In any case plants are utterly selfish. They never say, “After you, Alphonse.” They look at our neat rows and paths and just laugh.
The mystery to me is to go out in the wilderness, and see what plants do without us humans controlling them. You would think that, with plants so bad-mannered and selfish, a wildness would resemble a bombed-out and smoking war-zone. Instead it can be amazingly beautiful, and more awe-inspiring than the gardens of billionaires and kings.
Anyway, excellent post, which made me laugh. I especially liked the wording of, “there are portions of the garden that are VERY difficult to get to unless you have 6 foot long legs and can tip toe like a ballerina.” (Hyperbole is a valuable tool.)