By the time you read this, the fall high school and college sports season will be underway for us at the Herald, the first siren song of the declining summer.

But it also corresponds with the finality of the vegetative experiment that was my first-ever garden.

Don’t worry, this will be the final update of the summer. Even those road-weary travelers that are my 15 readers are probably getting a little tired of my latest fascination.

I’m still hoping to pull in No. 16. Incentive, I’ve got discount fig newtons.

To sum up what has happened since the last time I bragged/whined, the tomatoes have finally, for all intents and purposes, come to an end. This is a good thing, because at least for myself I’ve proven that yes, I do get a little sick of tomatoes.

BLTs have become the latest fashion trend for lunch these days not by desire really, but necessity. I want my counter space back.

I’m not nearly as excited as I had been for this king of sandwiches.

I was completely on team tomato, but now I feel a little different about things. I openly swear when I look at the garden and see a tomato and all of this, as I’ve said before, is my own fault for not researching just how many plants two people need. Six, it turns out, is too much.

However, that being said, the canned salsa I’ve made has been a great reward and a big hit in the house. I’m not even sure why I canned them because they aren’t going to be around long.

The same can’t be said for the canned tomatoes, which will sit there for awhile and think about what I’ve one.

Once the tomoatos on the counter are cobbled up, fairly forcefully I will add, those that I’ve canned will just sit and wait it out. I don’t plan to willingly have tomatoes for a while.

The beans finally came around, which I was worried about in the beginning. It took a while after planting before I saw anything.

To recount, the initial planting didn’t show much at all and I thought I had done something wrong, so I prepared some more and planted another round. That turned out to be a mistake.

As they began to grow I got excited that my supreme knowledge of planting in just my rookie year had lifted victory from the jaws of defeat.

Oh ignorance. You are so unkind.

The beans kept going and going, climbing up and up … wait, why were they climbing. Ahh, they were vine beans rather than bush beans. Mystery solved.

Mess began.

I’ve talked often during my summer reports of the growing conflict between the beans, tomatoes and cucumbers. Well the beans were kind of at the heart of it all, spreading everywhere and taking on all comers, without really growing anything until the very end. We’ve now got three bags of beans frozen in the freezer.

Success from the tangle of defeat as it were.

The cucumbers have been fantastic and exceeded my expectations. Refrigerator pickles have been an awesome addition to meals an snacks.

The only casualties, not counting carrots and radishes only because they did grow but ran out of room to grow more, were the green peppers. In the vine melee that ultimately took over the summer, they were swallowed up, never to be seen again.

Until very recently that is. When the tomatoes began to die away and thin out, I discovered the last remaining green pepper plant that I had lost.

Yes, I had lost plants —several in fact. They had become buried and forgotten until recently. Surprisingly, while not producing peppers, the plant itself was doing fairly well, even if not producing the peppers I was hoping for.

So what’s this mean for next year?

Well first and foremost, as I’ve already stated, fewer tomato plants.

Beans again, but perhaps either a trestle or bush beans, even if I did become fairly interested and hypnotized by watching the beans climb and tangle. I just don’t want to become a vegetable referee again.

Key to everything will be an addition to the garden just to create more space. In my zeal I threw a whole bunch of stuff in a small 5 by 10 foot area that looks like a hot mess right now.

And I want to think about potatoes and onions and maybe give the peppers a fighting chance.

The green thumb will eventually turn to the front where another bush is going to need to be a pulled before fall, giving that extra realestate to the raspberries, which are making a play on that land anyway. Next spring I hope to add a pair of pear trees to the front.

When I started this little experiment I said I had one real goal — get at least one third of the garden to produce, which I guess even in my delusions of overflowing bounty I had sufficient doubt of my skills. Go me.

Regardless of subconscious reality, I did make that goal and more so I’m saying this has been a success. Enough so that I’m going to do it all again next year and more.

The garden, however, has been a benefit in other ways though. Regardless of the day’s stresses and anxieties there was always the garden to strip those thoughts away.

It was mindless labor, where the only thing to concentrate on were the crops I was harvesting and the weeds I was pulling. Everything else went away and it was a measure of peace on those turbulent days when I needed it the most.

It was cathartic an it was meditative. Perhaps that was my goal from the very beginning and if the finding of that measure of piece was ultimately the success I sought — then goal achieved.

I loved my green knot and I will most definitely be diving headlong in again next year.