This is my first full summer in my first house, and therefore my first summer with a real garden. I already have a long, long list of what I’m going to do differently next summer… but first, I’ve gotta wait out this summer.
In the early Spring I used a small tiller to work up a strip of ground 30’ long and 3’ wide, around the back deck. The soil here is dark black, but also clay. So I worked in some bales of peat moss. Then I worked in some bags of compost.
In mid-May, I put in vegetable plants. The eggplant died immediately, but the sweet peppers and tomato plants are still there. The cucumber seeds came up. The zucchini didn’t. Today, I finally got around to mulching the bed and putting cages around the plants. I have a box of vegetable-specific fertilizer sitting in my garage, which I’ll use sometime. I also have a soaker hose that I’ll arrange in the bed, when the rain begins to slacken (no such luck yet–3" of rain last week!)
And now I sit and wait. I can hardly stand the suspense. Am I going to end up with bushels and baskets full of yummy home-grown tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers… or is something tragic going to happen halfway through the summer and leave me with nothing but a broken heart?
So far, most of my onions just didn’t come up. Only 1/3 of my beets are still alive, and those don’t look very good. However, I only lost about 1/4 to 1/3 of the radish, spinach, and turnips to various causes and the parsley is finally showing signs of life. The roses are going well - for now. Only 2 bean plants of 40 feet of planted row didn’t come up. This is sort of typical in my experience, not everything does well, and it will vary from year to year.
Yeah. The tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers were all seedlings. Cucumbers and zucchini are supposed to be such weeds that I thought there’d be no problems just sowing seed. Call me surprised that the zucchini didn’t come up! Maybe the seed was bad.
Unfortunately, the gardening center is all sold out of both, now. Humph.
Gardens usually lead to alcoholism. At some point you run out of friends to unload all the @#$ing tomatoes which inevitably leads to bar hopping. It’s the gardener’s version of looking for Mr. Goodbar.