A stroll through the garden.

This gardening thing can be so emotional. I can be so happy one second and a complete mess the next. I can be in awe of the beauty of life one second and completely deflated about the reality of life the next. It's an emotional roller-coaster, this whole gardening thing.

Take this gorgeous strawberry for example. It made me smile. For days! Each day I came out to water or feed the chickens and this beautiful strawberry was making googly eyes at me...getting more and more red by the day. Happiness is...this strawberry.

Or how about these baby peaches?

These little beauties were on the tree when I bought it. It made me happy. And I felt accomplished. I know, I know...I did nothing to make it all happen. But it felt like a boost...a head-start...and at the rate the earwigs were eating everything else I had planted, I needed some positive gardening reinforcement.

Hello little green bean leaves. How have you escaped the wrath of the earwig? Watch your backs. They're relentless. And they mock me.

Ahh...sweet snap pea tendrils. I love how they wrap themselves around the rusty wire and each other. It's such a beautiful tangled mess. Like life. Beautiful and messy.

OK, now this next photo is not for the faint of heart. This is the reality that is my garden. On the left: watermelon. On the right: Eight Ball zucchini. Hacked. Overnight. That's all it took. I was very sad.

I didn't think it was fair to only take pictures of beautiful strawberries and dainty tendrils. I thought that it would only be fair to take photos of ALL aspects of the garden. The good. The bad. The ugly. And the funny. (I'll explain in a minute)

So I began snapping photos of the pitiful remains of these poor little half-eaten seedlings, too. As you can see, in a pathetic attempt to stop the earwigs from eating their fill of my plants, I did the whole "organic roll up a damp newspaper to catch them" technique (which is bunk in my opinion...but whatever). I'm sorry...but one cannot stop an army of 42 billion earwigs with a few rolled up newspapers. It just can't be done. I'm beginning to understand, more and more, why people invented poisons to rid their gardens of pests and diseases. They had to have been desperate, too!

OK. So, for the "funny" part. You may have already noticed what I'm about to point out. As I was looking at the garden photos a little later in the afternoon I noticed the headline on the newspaper. Can you read what it says? Right next to the leaves eaten to smithereens? Yes. You read it right....

It reads: "That Smarts".

How appropriate. It still gives me a little laugh. And trust me...as I continue to lose the pest battle to something 1/1,000,000th my size...I needed a good laugh!