The hardest part of gardening is not correctly timing the seedling transfer, or deciding when a plant is a goner versus when it just needs one more week. The hardest part of gardening, at least for me, is resisting the urge to make cheap and facile metaphors. One example comes to mind from this weekend, when I was trellising a handful of truly overgrown cherry tomato plants. Cherry tomatoes are indeterminate, which means there's no size at which they stop growing and start to ripen. They're like mint, secretly — they will happily grow and grow and grow forever. The only thing stopping them, barring human intervention, is the comic rapidity with which they'll die: from blight, from dehydration, from sheer overextension — almost as quickly as they prospered, if not more so. There are a lot of ways to curtail this, and one of the things we do is trellis. We've got this very fun, K'nex-esque trellis system that acts as a kind of three-dimensional grid. The tricky bit is that you can't…
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