First BLT of the season was not half as satisfying as I’d anticipated.

My first BLT of the season was a mess. I only had two slices of bread, which I over-toasted. The only organic “happy pig” bacon available when I shopped the other day was the thick cut, which is great with eggs and toast, but doesn’t work so well in a sandwich. Especially one with over-toasted bread. A rainstorm came just as I was preparing to go pick a few leaves of lettuce from what’s left of the garden, but I did have some left in the fridge. I wanted that sandwich now.

Saturday there were two perfect yellow tomatoes on the plant Fred gave me. They didn’t release when I tried to pluck them that day, so I decided to wait til today, since I was having dinner out last night. I was out all day at a video job. When I went to pick those two perfect tomatoes, there was only one. At lunchtime, Deborah assured me, when she came to give the cat his pill for me, there were two. She also assured me she didn’t pick one. Where did it go? It was in a narrow fenced bed.

Those two tomatoes were priceless. Or, if not priceless, at least extremely costly. When I think of what I pay for water to grow the garden, and what I pay for help building soil and preparing the beds, and then I think of how I watched all but that and one other tomato plant get eaten down by the old doe just as fast as they could grow, I come to the painful conclusion that I’m financially and energetically better off shopping the farmers’ markets or getting a half share in a CSA.

That old doe. Over the course of three days in mid-June, just after I’d eaten the first few peas, she mowed down both rows. One afternoon I was in the kitchen and looked out the window to see her munching the violas from a pot on the patio. Another time, I was working at my desk, and the worthless dogs were napping on the couch because it was “too hot” for them outside. That’s what they said, anyway. I chanced to look up and see her enjoying the blossoms and first little fruits on the big cherry tomato. A few weeks later, when Chris and Dave were here with three extra catahoulas on the grounds, my friend looked out and saw her chowing down on the parsley.

It’s my fault. Earlier in the summer I walked out and found her at the edge of the yard eating snowberry leaves. That was ok. She’s so old and grey-faced. I felt sorry for her, and I have snowberry to spare. So I didn’t shoo her off, and didn’t call the dogs off their couch, where they were that time because they “thought it might rain.” And so, because I’m a softy and the dogs aren’t doing their job, she thinks she has carte blanche in my garden.

Well, she’s only half the problem. Or less. The grasshoppers this year are voracious. They’ve eaten down all the brussels sprouts, made lace of the acorn squash leaves, and are continually topping the scarlet runner beans. They or the doe are keeping the beet greens and romaine trimmed almost to the ground. For some other reason, the bell peppers are stunted, the melon vines are barely bigger than when I put them in the ground two months ago, and several of the jalapeños haven’t even blossomed yet.

There’s almost nothing coming to fruition in my garden except the zucchinis and those two perfect golden tomatoes. I mean, that one. Oh well. First-World problems. But it hasn’t been a total bust. I got a platter of jalapeño poppers out of it, and five heads of red leaf lettuce. And tonight, at least, I wasn’t out of mayonnaise.

Cream cheese and bacon stuffed jalapeños for last night’s summer feast with neighbors.

Lazy dog can’t keep deer out of the yard but happily buries their bones in the woods.

And the day started and ended with a rainbow. This rare morning rainbow over the mesa where I live was shot by Pamela from her ranch across the valley…

… right about the time I crawled out of bed and shot this sunrise beyond her house.

As I finished the over-toasted, under-tomatoed BLT, the sky gave up another rainbow.