Hey, do you like tomatoes? Like, really like tomatoes? Well, if tomatoes are your all-time favorite fruit and you can bite into one as if it were a big shiny apple, blasting tomato juice and seeds all over your face and down your chin and onto the new, white carpet and all over your yippy Yorkshire terrier Puddin’ Pop ... well, have I got news for you.

This past summer’s insane combination of torrential rain and smothering humidity have produced a perfect storm of produce. My yard runneth over. Like many of you, my wife Shannon and I have a little vegetable garden behind our house and holy crap just look at it.

Other than an initial staking-up of drooping tomato vines, we haven’t touched the garden all summer long. No watering. No weeding. No tending it in any way. Shannon figured out what to plant last spring, we planted it, and BANG-POW-POOF! We have more veggies than we can handle.

Our garden is the size of three to four normal sidewalk panels and has thus far produced well over 9,000 tomatoes. Do you have any idea how much tomato soup you could make with 9,000 tomatoes? How many liters of spaghetti sauce? How many BLTs? How many bottles of Mike’s Famous Tongue-Wallopin’ Horseradish and Wasabi Ketchup? I do:

Twenty thousand bowls of tomato soup, 15,000 liters of marinara, 27,500 BLTs, and five bottles of my famous ketchup (it’s really tomato-y). Obviously, as I’ve exhaustively proven in a totally scientific way, there are a lot of tomatoes growing in my yard.

It’s like a big plant orgy out there – leaves, stems, and stalks are shooting out all over the place. The tomatoes have mingled with the peppers. The zucchinis have infiltrated the sunflowers. The watermelons have crept into the beets. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a healthy toma-pepini-melon growing in there somewhere.

And I’m pretty sure there’s a spot in the garden – a spot way in the back where the light of the sun can’t reach – where rabbits and squirrels enter ... to never return. Late at night, as I carry carrot peels to the compost bin, I swear I can hear a strange whispering. And the other day, while picking a giant zucchini, my wife found some rudimentary digging tools.

    Anyhow, it’s a mess. And it looks like many of your yards are in the exact same condition. My wife really likes this time of year – when all the flowerbeds and gardens are just a big, tangled jumble. I think she likes how the branches get so twisted up and locked together that people just kind of give up on keeping their foliage neat and tidy. With a wise smirk spreading across her face, Mother Nature takes over and whispers, “Oh, you silly people. These vines don’t want to keep to themselves.”

Personally, I enjoy this messy time of year because the pressure’s off. We all just kind of collectively decide to let go and watch as life unfolds and reclaims the little plots of dirt we set aside for it. In short, I don’t need to worry about how ugly my yard looks.

However, as my wife will point out, it’s not really ugly at all. It’s actually astonishingly pretty when you look close enough. We’ve just been so hung up on the straight little rows we dug in the spring, being so careful to give everything plenty of breathing room – it’s easy to forget that carrots aren’t used to sprouting in a linear fashion, that tomatoes are born to meander.

So here in late August, as our gardens turn into gorgeous lattice works of living fiber, it seems like a good time to remind ourselves that it’s OK to get all tangled up and messy – especially when you realize how many people all around you are just as tangled and messy. There is most definitely beauty in the chaos.

And soon it’ll be time to pick all those vegetables and get all those gardens ready for the fall. Or, if you’re like me, let all those twisted up vines stay right were they are because, hey, it’s good ... um ... insulation ... for the winter and stuff. Right?