Last Year ... Successes and Lessons

Last year - 2013 - C and I planted the first garden either of us has ever had. I worked in the garden, both at my grandfather's farm and at my father and stepmother's place, some as a kid, but this was the first one that was really mine. C had never had a garden either, so this was a new experience in a lot of ways for both of us. Especially considering we'd only been dating a couple months when we decided to get ourselves into this.

We started with a 12' x 24' bare spot (literally) and dug down a few inches, removing the grass, weeds, and top dirt. We enclosed the space with welded wire fence to keep out critters from deer to the occasional bear to small dogs chasing thrown tennis balls. We then lined the fence, inside and out, with river rocks. We also dug out spots on three sides of the garden plot for the fruit: raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries.

When I say "we" you should understand that I mostly mean C. I carried a lot of rocks, and wheeled a lot of wheelbarrows full of dirt from the new garden space to the place where C wanted to build a new berm to contain overflow from the pond, I even carried and dumped a lot of top soil and compost. But C did almost all the digging. He was aided ably one day by his teenage son and one of his friends, but it was mostly him. The clay here is super hard, and I was incapable of removing more than an inch or two at a time. Luckily he's super strong and awesome.

Finally we brought in a huge load of top soil and compost. Initially we used these to make hills, in which we planted our beautifully started seedlings. This was completely unsuccessful (lesson #1) and we almost lost all our plants. In desperation we carefully pulled out any plants that looked like they still had any life in them, and mixed the soil and compost into the newly dug out garden plot. We then planted the plants back into the ground, still in rows, though they were a little less organized this time. This yielded much better results. Apparently the clay, while hard, has lots of nutrients that plants love.

As the season went on, the plants really took root, grew and flourished. We ended up with more yellow squash than we could eat, so we froze a lot. We also ended up with lots more cucumbers than we would use (C is the only one who eats them) so I made lots of refrigerator pickles. I'm planning to get canning

equipment before summer gets too well started this year so we can put some of our bounty away more long term, and so we can more easily share it with those we love! We ended up with a decent amount of broccoli, eggplants, cabbage, cauliflower, cherry tomatoes, basil, and rosemary too. And the asparagus plants looked great, even though they take several years to actually produce. We also had lots of Beefmaster tomatoes, but they (frustratingly) never ripened, lots of hearty looking brussels sprouts plants, though they never fully developed, and peppers - thai chile and jalapeno - that were kind of bitter. Finally, we lost all the kale to too much sun, and the whole pumpkin patch to a freak hail storm - "freak" being more a term to describe the size of the hail (fist-sized!) than the fact that it happened in the first place. That was more sad for me than the other losses, partly because I was so excited about the pumpkins. We were to have three varieties: Casper (white ones), Big Max (they get really big), and Jack-o-Lantern (self-explanatory, yes?), and I love Halloween, so I was really looking forward to carving a whole bunch of them. But I think it was hard too because the whole lot were destroyed. Some, like the picture here, were just busted open by the

hail. It looks like a sad face, which is one reason I chose to take a picture of that one, but being pounded by the hail really made all those scars. Those rotted and died pretty quickly. The rest died because the leaves of the plants were so torn up that they couldn't provide the still developing and growing little babies with enough nutrients to make it.


In the end, though, it was more lessons, just things we'll do differently this year. That's one great thing about gardening, I think. As long as you aren't going to starve without that plant being successful, you know you can always try again next year. So this year we'll start them all down in the soil, water more early on, provide a little shade for the delicate greens, and cross our fingers against more hail. I can't promise I won't be out there trying to cover all the tender little veggie bodies if it does happen. This year we'll have all heirloom varieties and a more diverse crop. The asparagus will come back, and we'll have basil, rosemary, kale, yellow squash (though fewer plants), cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants, broccoli, cauliflower, and pumpkins again. But we'll also have cilantro, sweet yellow and blue corns, lima and soy beans, and zucchini, butternut and acorn squashes.

With all these plants, we're going to need a lot of pollinating. Which means we're going to need a lot of bees. Which brings me to the next -and possibly biggest - project we'll be undertaking this summer: beekeeping! More on that in the next post.

Until then, Em