We had very mixed success with the leafy greens this year. I think part of that was not knowing the light of the new garden plot very well and part of it was the spectacular fail of watering on my part. But for the greens that actually came up, it was an interesting lot.
The arugula [...]
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When looking for beans to plant this year, I was late to the party and had no idea what I wanted. Honestly, I think this led to a large portion of the mistakes this year, but learning from success unusual, so I’m counting this as a teaching year. Sounds better that way. Building out this garden has had a very interested set of unintended consequences. Fortunately, they’ve almost all been good. But I would have never guessed at their diversity or breadth. The biggest lesson this year was around tomatos. I did so many things wrong, it’s almost impossible to count them. Nearly every step along the way, I made a mistake. Most were recoverable, but it meant that we ended up with a crop of about a dozen tomatos from 16 plants. This is a miserable [...] Autumn is in full swing here – the winds have picked up and its pouring down cold rain every day. That means that I’m starting to work on putting the garden to bed for the winter. It’s easy to pull the dead plants, but harder to gauge how long some of the others will last. [...] We’ve been picking peas and beans off the same plants in small quantities, just enough for a meal, all summer. We’ve had arugula and some chard pop up and been completely disappointed by the New Zealand spinach. It looks way too much like the nightshade we grow to risk harvesting any. With the installation of the fence, and the start of nice weather, we’ve started letting the cats out for supervised playtime. This may have been a mistake. Now instead of coming home to cats who want to snuggle or chase things, we come home to the insistent yowl of “let me out.” Last month I was finally able to get out into the yard and do some actual plant. After dispersing the 15 yards of topsoi and waiting for it to stop raining long enough to avoid walking in muddy glop, I hoed in 15 rows for planting. Each of these rows are 2 feet apart and [...] The snow has finally (mostly) stopped. This means we’ve been able to get out and put plants in the ground. We finally committed to species for the shrubs and trees and purchased them. Black currants, 3 kinds of blueberries that take part shade and cold, and Spartan and Jonagold apple trees. Back on April 5th, I went insane with the warmth and sun and dragged my husband off to the nursery. We did some looking at the apple trees and currants and decided that we didn’t have enough information to commit to species yet. |
Date: 12/25/2003 |
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