This picture doesn’t do it justice, but we’ve been getting almost equal volume cucumbers to tomatoes in every harvest this year.

Tomatoes are a gift that almost everyone appreciates.  They disappear like magic almost as soon as I start to complain that I don’t know what I’m going to do with them.

Cucumber, on the other hand?  Not so much.

This year, we’ve taken to conditioning gifts of tomatoes upon people taking cucumbers with them.

I’ve also researched cucumber recipes and tried to find more ways to use them.  I’m nowhere near the point where I need to be to take correct use of what my garden is producing.

I’ve seen this pattern in many of my start-ups.  They want to do X.  But it turns out, their business is used by others to do Y.  And now, they have to scramble to deal with the reality that is different than their plans.

Yet again, the garden is a great metaphor for start-ups.

Again, the Garden has great lessons for life.  As I wrote in April, this year, I did quite a bit of early preparation for the garden.  Sometimes, if you work hard, and conditions are just right, you get *really* lucky.  It looks like that’s what will happen with the garden this year.

Here are some of the tomato seedlings and a baby summer squash, immediately after they were planted back in late April.  Thanks to a warm weather prediction, I was able to get all the summer garden plants in the ground 2 weeks before I usually do (to avoid the frost).

Here they are a couple weeks later, after I added the supports.  (The pots contain hot peppers.)

Thanks to a very warm spring and the automatic watering system, I had the lushest June 1 garden I’ve every had.

The squash and basil were producing on the first of the month, so we could enjoy BBQ garden pizzas.

The cucumbers and butternut squash had a similar late spring.  Here they are after planting in late April.

And, here they are by early June (see them climbing the back fence?).

And this is what they look like today.  The cucumbers are producing like mad — I’ve had to resort to giving gift cukes to deal with the volume.  The butternuts are still too young to harvest, but if the early fruits are any indication, this fall should bring the biggest harvest of butternut squashes I’ve ever had.

And the tomatoes?  They are insane.  We’ve never had plants this big with this much fruit before the 4th of July.  We had our first ripe tomatoes on June 22nd!  What a great way to celebrate the first day of Summer (and yes, in an odd coincidence, it was overcast and drizzling that day).

Look at all those fruits just waiting to ripen in the sun!

The heat wave we are currently experiencing in California will only speed the rate of production.  Yesterday’s harvest was awesome — the last of the arugula that had gone to seed, and cukes and squash galore, plus one ripe pink caspian tomato and a few green tomatoes for frying.

I’m looking forward to a tomato-tacular summer!

After all the work and the waiting (we had a much more mild summer than normal, which delayed the tomatoes by almost a month), finally, the garden is in full production mode:

For the last several weeks, I’ve been harvesting a basket like this:

And this week, I expect there will be 2 or more.

The big downside to the late blooming garden is that much of the heavy harvesting will need to occur in September or October, when I’m working to close transactions for clients before the end of the fiscal quarter and/or traveling. But, the upside potential is huge as well. If we can avoid a frost, I have enough green tomatoes that there should be a constant stream of ripening tomatoes that stretches well into Thanksgiving. Making sauce and canning tomatoes and pickles in the cooler fall months is very much preferable to doing the same in August.

And the garden to start-up analogies continue: sometimes, despite your best efforts and hard work, things don’t scale when you plan them to scale. But, sometimes, the delay comes with its own sweet rewards.

The beauty of the first big harvest (even if it comes at least a month late due to weird 2011 weather!):

Even in a bad year, home-grown heirloom tomatoes are overwhelming in September:

Tomatoes are my favorite food, so many of my Summer meals look like this:

And when the harvests start to decline, it isn’t even all that sad:

Eventually, the summer garden plants need to be removed to make way for the winter garden. Ideally, I get a chance to do it before the first frost when there are still green tomatoes. This year, the last harvest of the summer was the week before Thanksgiving.

This is what happens when a Southerner marries a Californian with a garden (fried green tomatoes aren’t a side, they’re the main attraction in a dinner salad!).

And, of course, I pickled most of the green tomatoes for later enjoyment.

Last night, December 1st, we ate the very last of the ripe tomatoes from the Summer garden (stored in the fridge after the last harvest).

And now, it’s nothing but leafy greens, brassicas, and making our way through the winter squash ’til next summer.

As you may recall, I started late on the garden this year, and decided to minimize the plantings.

I am glad.

I started with this:

A few weeks later, had this:

And, now, after 3 weeks away with the garden on the automatic watering, I have more than enough work cut out for me:

Due to the late start and the cool summer start, I still don’t have any ripe tomatoes, but there are hundreds of green ones. And I can’t wait.

There are a few ripe cucumbers, and I suspect I’ll find a few other early goodies when I clear the weeds, prune the plants, and support the plants that have outgrown their allocated spaces.

Overall, I’m congratulating myself on the decision to downsize the garden this year. At the beginning, when the plants are small, it seems so easy to add just one or two more. But now, when production is in full swing, I’m going to have several hours of work each weekend just to keep the plants healthy and bearing fruit.

The garden/start-up analogy is clear: Plan for growth at the start so that it doesn’t crush you when it comes.