“No one likes a know-it-all,” my wife informed me.
“Geez Louise, I did not know THAT!” So endowed with this fresh spirit of humility by my spouse, I think I will write about the things that did not go right in my garden this year.
My pumpkins, which I had hoped to sell as fall decorations and Halloween jack-o-lanterns, totally failed. Despite the vines getting off to a great start, they were too far from the house to irrigate and after the drought, the squash borers, the squash bugs and the cucumber beetles got done with them, I couldn’t find enough plant residue to pick up to put in a compost pile. The field was just bare sand.
I have never seen more apples on a tree than were on mine this summer but that apparent blessing proved a curse since the drought caused almost all to fall from the tree early. I buried about five wheel barrow loads of apples into my garden and compost pile and managed to salvage only about a bushel for us to eat. If you don’t have an apple tree you might consider growing a few rhubarb plants instead; rhubarb makes a very similar tasting pie, ripens in the spring not the fall, doesn’t require the dormant oil spraying and pruning and takes up only a fraction of the space of a tree. I have a brother who will take rhubarb pie over apple any day.
I am starting to hate carrots, what with all the slow germination, thinning and weeding. I have nothing to show for all the effort. I will try one more year and if I don’t get results I will just replace them in recipes with the much easier to grow butternut squash or sweet potatoes. I turned my sister onto growing sweet potatoes this year and in her words, “All I did was plant them and harvest them.” The butternut squash has a shell so tough it is hard to cut with a knife and so it is not bothered much by the pests that do in other squash and pumpkins. Mine grew well between my rows of sweet corn so space was not an issue.
The garden literature describes how wonderfully productive fall gardens of cold hardy crops can be. I have witnessed my sister keep chard and kale growing all winter long in a cold frame made of straw bales with some storm window glass placed over the bales. So I made plans to grow a robust fall garden of cabbages, beets, chard, kale, lettuce and spinach. These crops may do well during the cool, rainy weather of fall but in September the young seedlings took a total smack-down from still ubiquitous insect pests and never got established. Even though I watered daily I got zip for my effort. So my pipedreams of cooked greens, salads and slaws in mid winter remain for another try next year. I think I may broadcast some turnip seed next autumn; that should have the most chance of success.
Lest you consider me a total loser by this point let me say that I was successful in producing significant garden produce for each month of the year despite my fall fiasco. We ate salads almost daily in the spring; we ate huge quantities of melons all summer and into the fall along with potatoes, green beans, corn etc. For this fall I have a good stock of butternut squash and sweet potatoes to get us through to spring. In our freezer there are still some bags of frozen summer produce: cherries, corn, green beans, tomatoes and bell peppers, but I expect these will finished by the new year.
I realize this sufficiency kick of producing some of our food year-round is just a game, but a retiree needs some games to pass his time and I would be really awful at basketball or golf. My wife has a venison roast in the crockpot that I need to go check on now so I better sign off for today as your very, very humble GRAND GURU OF CHEAP!
“Geez Louise, I did not know THAT!” So endowed with this fresh spirit of humility by my spouse, I think I will write about the things that did not go right in my garden this year.
My pumpkins, which I had hoped to sell as fall decorations and Halloween jack-o-lanterns, totally failed. Despite the vines getting off to a great start, they were too far from the house to irrigate and after the drought, the squash borers, the squash bugs and the cucumber beetles got done with them, I couldn’t find enough plant residue to pick up to put in a compost pile. The field was just bare sand.
I have never seen more apples on a tree than were on mine this summer but that apparent blessing proved a curse since the drought caused almost all to fall from the tree early. I buried about five wheel barrow loads of apples into my garden and compost pile and managed to salvage only about a bushel for us to eat. If you don’t have an apple tree you might consider growing a few rhubarb plants instead; rhubarb makes a very similar tasting pie, ripens in the spring not the fall, doesn’t require the dormant oil spraying and pruning and takes up only a fraction of the space of a tree. I have a brother who will take rhubarb pie over apple any day.
I am starting to hate carrots, what with all the slow germination, thinning and weeding. I have nothing to show for all the effort. I will try one more year and if I don’t get results I will just replace them in recipes with the much easier to grow butternut squash or sweet potatoes. I turned my sister onto growing sweet potatoes this year and in her words, “All I did was plant them and harvest them.” The butternut squash has a shell so tough it is hard to cut with a knife and so it is not bothered much by the pests that do in other squash and pumpkins. Mine grew well between my rows of sweet corn so space was not an issue.
The garden literature describes how wonderfully productive fall gardens of cold hardy crops can be. I have witnessed my sister keep chard and kale growing all winter long in a cold frame made of straw bales with some storm window glass placed over the bales. So I made plans to grow a robust fall garden of cabbages, beets, chard, kale, lettuce and spinach. These crops may do well during the cool, rainy weather of fall but in September the young seedlings took a total smack-down from still ubiquitous insect pests and never got established. Even though I watered daily I got zip for my effort. So my pipedreams of cooked greens, salads and slaws in mid winter remain for another try next year. I think I may broadcast some turnip seed next autumn; that should have the most chance of success.
Lest you consider me a total loser by this point let me say that I was successful in producing significant garden produce for each month of the year despite my fall fiasco. We ate salads almost daily in the spring; we ate huge quantities of melons all summer and into the fall along with potatoes, green beans, corn etc. For this fall I have a good stock of butternut squash and sweet potatoes to get us through to spring. In our freezer there are still some bags of frozen summer produce: cherries, corn, green beans, tomatoes and bell peppers, but I expect these will finished by the new year.
I realize this sufficiency kick of producing some of our food year-round is just a game, but a retiree needs some games to pass his time and I would be really awful at basketball or golf. My wife has a venison roast in the crockpot that I need to go check on now so I better sign off for today as your very, very humble GRAND GURU OF CHEAP!
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