With the Gimpy Garden doing well, as seen above with some of our first harvest, Cait & Marty are heading out today to scoop poop from a llama ranch with Alison, our llama guide.

Come fall, the llamas’ gift will grace our raised asparagus bed and get topped off with a thick matting of straw to put that part of the garden to bed for the winter.

Rotted llama doo is exquisite as a fertilizer, as is the cow poop we fork into big buckets and bring home each year from the Madison World Cow Expo - the cow show of all cow shows. There is much Guano Gold for the taking at the Cow Expo, and even bales of straw that otherwise would end up in a landfill when tractors and garbage trucks roll in to clean up at the cow show’s end.

Combine that with the bedding from our chicken coop, the contribution from our worms, and the black gold from our Mantis Compost Twin and we’ve got a pretty good Slow Food movement happening here at G.G. World Headquarters.

Our Garden Cherub clearly is stunned by the generous gifts bestowed upon her by Mother Nature.

She’s usually front and center in all her glory in The Gimpy Garden.

These days, however, she’s rapidly vanishing under squash vines, as seen below.

The Cherub, a small concrete facsimile of a ship’s prow, has lived in Marty’s gardens for about 15 years now.

She used to live on Cait’s side of the Gimpy Garden, where Marty placed her under a tree thinking she would delight Cait. A year passed without Cait mentioning the arrival of the Cherub, so Marty asked, “Do like her?” and Cait said, “Not really.” So now the Cherub is back on Marty’s side presiding over vines as fertile and fine as she believes herself to be.

The Gimpy Garden is in blast-off mode and each morning brings pretty sights like this squash growing in a ceramic container.

We’ve hit that point in summer where fruits and vegetables mature at an unbelievable rate.

Cait & Marty assiduously check for ripening goodies and nearly every time discover a nearly too ripe or nearly too big cucumber or squash we swear wasn’t there the last time we looked.

As Cait says: “They don’t grow. They just pop up!”

Our “Little Shop of Horrors” Pumpkin Patch continues to erupt. Pictured above is the ever-exploding mound. Pictured below is one leaf of the mound juxtaposed against a common teaspoon.

Click here to see the mound a couple of weeks ago.

Eds Note: In the upper corner of the top photo is part of Cait’s accumulation of crutches, canes, metal poles, bed springs and futon parts.

The pile, which used to be much bigger, has been dispersed throughout the gardens as plant supports and to the curb on recycling days.

It’s like swimming against the tide - as soon as something disappears, Cait attends another tag, yard, estate, garage, junk sale - or just drives down the street looking at other people’s castoffs - and more arrives home in our backyard.

When the snow thawed last spring, our yard looked like something from the “Grapes of Wrath”. All we needed was the box springs and mattress tied to the top of the car.

This tomato, fresh from our Garden, has such personality it seems a shame to eat him.

These photos of our pumpkin patch were taken just days apart.

We have two varieties in there - Atlantic Giants and Pump Ke Mons. Cait thrills to see the pumpkins grow. Marty thrills to see the vines turning into something from the Little Shop of Horrors - “Feed me!”

If you live in a condo or an apartment, and have a sunny spot, you can go grow a pumpkin vine in a container and have beaucoup foliage within weeks. They are easy to grow and the vines are gorgeous, though they need full sun to bear fruit.

What we have here is a depression in our backyard, presumably where the septic tank was buried before our home was hooked to the city sewer system. The depression becomes a small pond during heavy rains - perfect for water-loving pumpkin roots.

For our containers, we coiled lengths of chicken wire into cages and filled them with leaves, half-rotted compost, straw and old bedding from the chicken coop. The pumpkins are loving it, as you can tell! We had a cold spring and planted late this season, so we’re not banking on a huge crop. It always gratifying to get even a few.

To learn more about pumpkins, check out The Pumpkin Nook

Cait & Marty are avid worm composters. Our worm bin stays outside in a shady cool spot during the warmer months and comes indoors during our arctic winters.

Because there is no heavy lifting, it’s a great way to compost if you have mobility issues. And the worms turn everything from coffee grounds to dryer lint into rich compost that makes your garden thrive.

If you haven’t tried it but are curious, click hear to read about one woman who turned to worm composting after she became disabled with a chronic illness.

Marty dreamed that she, Cait and their dogs were living in the Doomsday Seed Vault near the top of the world.

In reality, the vault is frozen and filled with thousands of seed racks. But in Marty’s dream the vault was a huge, lush, exotic greenhouse where the seeds needed to save the earth were growing profusely from the walls and ceiling.

The space was easy to move around in. And because this was a dream, all the plants took care of themselves - no weeding, watering, pruning, bending or hauling. A Gimpy Eden. Our sole purpose was to wander and admire the magnificence.

If you want to learn more about the real Seed Vault, click here to read the New Yorker story by John Seabrook or here to see a video.

We love that this young businessman/gardner in Malaysia gives away produce to people who bring him material for compost.

He’s also started numerous ventures to help people with disabilities learn to farm and then have a place to sell their produce.

He’s got big ideas about gardening small - an idea that many of us can embrace.

Click here to learn more.

If you’ve read even a few of our posts, you know we value eccentricity. In fact, soon after they met, Cait said she found Marty so eccentric that it made Cait feel normal.

“You normalize my wackiness,” were Cait’s exact words.

With a shared passion for universal design, great gadgets and a belief in the theory of Occam’s Razor - “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best” - we embarked on an experimental (eccentric) garden two years ago.

The garden, we decided, had to be Gimpy and dog friendly, as organic as was reasonably possible, heavy on container gardening and composting, and steeped in the idea of using junk valuables Cait hauls home recycles from yard sales and curbs. One example is Cait’s Crutch Tomato Cage seen here.

Thus far, we’ve learned that our Gimpy Garden containers are magnificent for growing tomatoes, herbs, cucumbers, melons, peas, beans and other annuals, and lousy for growing perennials, including asparagus and thornless blackberry vines.

The asparagus and blackberries died during the winter in their 30-gallon galvanized metal garbage cans, despite heavy mulching for protection from the cold. A raised wood bed of asparagus sailed right through and has just begun sending up gorgeous stalks of Purple Passion.

So we’re ditching the idea of perennials in cans and are replacing them with annuals, which we start indoors under grow lights. This summer, we’re focusing on innovative (eccentric) ways to use the many bedsprings and curved metal headboards Cait has dragged brought home for use as trellis for beans, peas and flowers.

All this is a way of warning you of the eccentric photos coming your way this summer because we just got an 8-foot by 10-foot plastic and aluminum greenhouse and are in 7th Heaven.