“Well, you have never seen such pathetic vegetables in your life. Tiny

lettuce plants shriveled up even smaller than the seedlings we’d bought

from the store. Bulbous zucchini two inches long and covered in tiny

squirrel chew-marks. The only things that really grew well were the herbs,

and that just meant I was trying to add mint to everything until Alice

finally got sick of it sometime in mid-July. But the tomatoes were a

different story.”