Adventures in gardening.

It's been a fun year for gardening. Much was learned and a little bit of food was even grown! I will start with musing from this year and go into some plans for next year.

Let's start with something in nearly every garden: tomatoes. They are relatively easy to grow. I tried to start tomatoes from seeds, but quickly learned I started way too late and lacked the proper equipment to do this properly. I ended up buying four types of tomato seedlings, hoping to have successive crops. So far so good. They are so versatile and, as I said, very easy to maintain. I think they could be more productive with attentive pruning as well as a proper cage. I use cages but the tomatoes quickly overwhelm them, so I think something better is needed. So far I've made two jars of (delicious) pasta sauce and hopefully I'll have enough for several more. I've got dozens of green tomatoes waiting in the wings.

Moving on to cucumbers. This is another garden staple. These I did successfully start from seeds. This year I decided to go with two plants instead of three as I had tried last year with some success. I also wanted to train this years plants. Using 6 ft. cedar stakes, I ran the cucumbers up and across a (moderately) sturdy wire. What a difference this made! The leaves grew huge, providing a lot of shade for the base of the plants. This meant very little watering was required. I periodically added tea and coffee grounds as fertilizer, as I did with many of the plants. As some of you may have seen from my pickling pictures, it was a good crop. We gave away probably a dozen cukes (so far), as well as ate several and pickled many more. I'm not sure how the pickles will taste since they won't be ready for another six weeks. Anyway, they are winding down in production, though we'll probably get about a dozen more. All-in-all I would guess we will end up with about 30-40 cukes. Not too shabby.

Next we have green beans. Boy do we have a lot of them! These were started easily from seeds, as well. I made a 4 ft. high tepee (sort of) with thin bamboo poles and string. This proved to be effective, though it should have been taller with fewer plants (I planted 16 total). The vines grew wildly! We have a very large bag of beans frozen, which we will add plenty more to as the plants continue to produce. One important note: pick the beans before they get too big. The flavor changes quite dramatically, as well as the tenderness. Younger is better. Small is tasty.

We also tried corn. The corn plants I had bought while at the nursery without planning on it. I saw them and knew I had a little space available. I spread out five corn plants which grew relatively well. If you don't bunch them up, however, they will lean and fall over. I had to stake them up. While it was interesting to grow them, it turned out to be a waste. What little corn they produced was not very good. We will not be growing it next year. I look at it this way, we live in Ohio, one of the biggest corn producing states in America. When in season, fresh corn is everywhere for about a quarter an ear or less. I would rather try something else in my own garden.

Another veggie we tried was bell peppers (capsicums, as our British friends call them). Once again I attempted starting them from seeds, but, as with the tomatoes, this took more planning and effort than I offered. We purchased two plants, one red and one green. I left these to grow in medium sized pots instead of planting them in the ground. This was not very successful. They looked rather sad and one plant was on death's door, so I decided to plant them next to the cucumbers (another benefit of training cukes-it leaves the ground open for other things). They have bounced back somewhat, though we've seen little in the way of production. Hopefully as summer draws down we will see a decent crop.

While at the nursery I also spotted a grapevine. I hadn't really considered trying to grow grapes and I wasn't completely sure these could be successfully done in a garden. Well, I decided to buy it and do a little research for growing tips. So far the vine has grown up and across the support I rigged up, but we haven't seen any grapes. I believe they don't start producing until autumn, so we're at the wait-and-see stage right now. I hope we get grapes, but either way it's pretty neat having the possibility!

Lettuce took its place this year, too. We bought a pack of Romaine lettuce seeds and I sprinkled them on the ground as the first veggie of the spring since they prefer cooler weather. The lettuce grew quickly and we were immediately up to our necks in salad! In fact we had so much lettuce that we got incredibly bored with eating salads and just gave up. We ended up with way more lettuce than we could hope to eat, so a lot of it ended up in the compost bin (also new this year and quite successful). I may plant some more of a different variety in the fall.

Some other crops we tried were carrots, onions and potatoes. Carrots were quickly given up on, as the seeds struggled to sprout. They are cheap to buy in the grocery, and, had we been able to grow a few, may not have been worth the time and effort. The onions were good. The bulbs grew as big as the space they were in, which wasn't very big since I crammed them together! Fresh onions, in case you've never had the pleasure, are VERY powerful. They were tasty and fantastic in many dishes. Finally we had potatoes. I tried make clever use of some out-of-the-way yard space by planting some spuds. The good news is they took off quickly. The bad news is they should have been buried much deeper, since they require constant additions of dirt as they get taller. I ran out of dirt and was faced with the decision of either buying more soil or letting them die and consider it a lesson learned. I went with the latter, as I couldn't justify spending a lot of money on soil to produce potatoes that can be bought cheap.

So, what are the plans for next year? First we are working on an expansion. Our garden has been contained to the side of the house, with a few exceptions, for the past couple of years. In front we have a couple of decent little flower beds. I have already began expanding the flower beds in preparation for next spring. We should end up with about twice as much growing space. Part of the reason for this is to make better use of the land we have. The front yard is pretty typical. It is on a slight slope, fairly small, and mostly grass. Basically it is useless. Maintaining a grass-covered front yard is an exercise in futility. You mow, water, and fertilize (actually I stopped watering and fertilizing a while ago) so you can have a decent lawn that serves, essentially, no purpose. Granted some people have nice yards they can play with the kids and do other activities, but I consider those the exceptions. Unless you live on a farm, grass is completely useless. Thus we want to replace some of this grass with a larger space for growing flowers, fruits and vegetables. I would love to get rid of the entire yard and just have a huge garden, but we won't be in the house for more than a couple more years and that might limit the number of buyers.
Anyway, plans are in the works for what to do with the space. Certainly we will have flowers and shrubs, especially in the less sunny areas next to the house, but we also plan on mixing in fruit and vegetable plants. We're also kicking around ideas like decorative solar lights, bird feeders, etc. We've got a lot of time for planning, so no big deal if we don't know what we want yet. The things I would certainly want are strawberries, a fruit bush (blueberries?), more peppers, more tomatoes, more onions, a variety of lettuces and who knows what else. We will also have the garden on the side of the house again (and perhaps expand that a bit). I'd like to do cucumbers as well as tomatoes, beans, lettuce, and whatever else comes up. I'm also thinking about a clever way to grow potatoes in a small area with little maintenance (I'll provide details if we go forward with it). Using the lessons from last year I think next season will be even better than this, just as this year was more productive than last. I'll keep everyone posted and we've been getting pictures of the progress.