Reflections on a summer of serious gardening

Ever since landing in Arizona I’ve gardened where I could, but this summer the stars aligned, and I applied myself to it more seriously. While I’ve complained about the limitations of backyard gardening as a response to hard times, the underlying instinct is surely sound, and obviously I feel it myself. In redoubling my efforts, my goals were to:

• Grow fresh food to reduce the frequency of trips to a supermarket
• Produce luxuries for the joy, satisfaction, and economy of it
• Improve in my practice of an engrossing and ecologically-sound craft that fits well with these homebound times
• Experiment with production of staples out of curiosity and symbolism

Broadly speaking it was a great year. Below are some notes and thoughts on what I learned, organized by vegetable crop; I hope to do a post on my experimentation with staples soon.

As usual we grew quite a lot of potatoes. It’s not for any logical reason I can tell; new potatoes in summer are delicious, but we grow more than that – I think it’s for the joy and symbolism of it. The plants are so happy and vibrant-looking, and digging them up is like discovering Christmas presents. I started in late March or early April with a box of wizened, shrunken red potatoes that got away from us and started sprouting in the basement. As an experiment I dug a trough in some of the newly tilled ground, stuck in the sprouted potatoes, and tented over them with used window sashes. They got off to a slow start, as it was occasionally still snowing that eraly in the season, but even the ones that were outside the glass tent re-sprouted eventually after the first tips got blasted by frost. The bulk of our crop we planted back in the main garden using seed potatoes from the garden center or fedco. They don’t need much attention besides hilling and diligently picking the beetles (or an application or two of spinosad, which I use on occasion). The kids love digging them; Z got right into it and put them in the bucket while I turned the soil with a fork.

Strawberries I think we’re starting to get the hang of; we grow them because they are delicious, luxurious, and not actually too much work. I used to think of them as finicky but at least in our soil they go quite rampant, taking over the aisles and nearby beds and continuing to grow late into the fall when hard freezes have flattened lesser plants. This year in the early spring J&K transplanted some runners into new beds near the greenhouse, including a shovelful of soil with the plants (‘strawberry sod’?) and they took off and produced a decent crop. Toward the end of the season the berries get small, and it got to be a bit of a chore to pick and freeze them, which is good I think in that it reminds us that we don’t actually want everbearing strawberries, and For Every Thing There Is a Season. They need to be weeded diligently, but the biggest problem is waxwings pecking the ripe fruit. In the past we have used floating netting, but sometimes the birds get under it and thrash themselves to death, which is less than pleasant. This year I criscrossed flash tape above the beds instead, and it seemed to be mostly effective and less work.

Fresh greens are a big part of why we garden. This year that started early with lettuce, kale, and spinach from the greenhouse, and we (Kelsey mostly) did pretty well at succession plantings (out in the beds, not in the greenhouse) to keep us in salad fixings throughout the summer. For me the big discovery of the season was broccoli raab. I grabbed a packet at O’Donals or somewhere early in the year, and was amazed at how much faster it grew compared to other greens, how free it was from worms and bugs, and how it would hang in for a good while before flowering and going to seed. The rest of the crew here is less excited about the bitter greens flavor than I am, but I will continue to grow it for its vigor and sheer enthusiasm.

Continuing on the brassica theme, I had resolved to grow a lot of broccoli this year, since it’s nice fresh and we also use a lot of it (mostly bags of frozen from TJs) – I hoped to freeze a bunch for the winter. We started some in the greenhouse and transplanted out a dozen or so, and they did OK, with the majority producing a respectable medium-sized head followed by side shoots the rest of the summer. I think I planted them too close together, and they would have benefitted from more compost. I ended up freezing a couple gallon bags of florets, but ended up feeling that I could have done better. We had some extra healthy-looking seedlings in the greenhouse that I couldn’t bear to ditch, and we were already fully planted out, so I put them in large (5 gallon?) plastic pots we had lying around, mixing in compost at as much as 50%. These did OK but probably would have done far better had I planted one or two to a pot instead of 5 or so. The meta-lesson is not to be sentimental about seedlings – as it is written, Many are Called, but Few are Chosen.

I also planted some cauliflower that acted strange; it eventually grew heads but they were heavily interspersed with green leaves, such that it was kind of a dissection project to eat it. I should probably think ahead and order from Johnny’s or Fedco rather than trusting a garden center seed rack next year. We grew kale as usual, and it did well as usual; Kelsey also grew a big bed of collards of which they may have eaten a few meals, and Holly in Somerville grew a kohlrabi the size of a football. As the season winds down and colder weather sets in the brassicas grow on me; even after 17F there are still some broccoli florets hanging in there, and I wish I had some brussels sprouts. I’ve started my winter salad regime of shredded red cabbage, grated carrot, and kitchen-window alfalfa sprouts; maybe next year I’ll plant some cabbages. The biggest problem with brassicas is the little green worms; one theory to try for next year is to plant them all in a row to facilitate a more disciplined application of Bt.

One of the meta-lessons of garden planning and meal psychology is that early-season stuff like kale and chard quickly lose their appeal when the midsummer vegetables come in. A frank acceptance of this might have us harvest and freeze these crops en masse as the zucchinis etc. start to come in, and reuse the space for a succession crop.

The value of succession plantings become clear this time of year, with the sturdy holdouts offering cheer as everything else dies back. Carrots and spinach seem to be the most robust, surviving a hard freeze that withered most of the lettuce and chard. We did a pretty good job with successive plantings of both, and are harvesting them still. We tried likewise with beets as well but could have done better; we discovered along the way that goldfinches peck the leaves to the point of destruction.

Alongside the carrots and spinach the leeks are also green and hearty, and we’re pulling them as needed. They grow easily once started, and grocery-store leeks are $2.50 each, so despite their modest aspect, they definitely counts in the luxury category. Regardless of means, I would have a hard time putting $15 of anything in a humble pot of soup, so growing them in profusion feels like a particularly snug form of wealth. The only change for next year is we should have planted them deeper to make the white part longer, though Holly says we should just roast the green parts with salt and oil – I tried it and they were OK; I found myself keeping a container of them in the fridge and chopping them into e.g. fried rice to good effect. In other allium news, Kelsey grew the usual bed of garlic and started some onions from seed; they seemed to falter (perhaps from the drought) but eventually caught on. I also planted a bag of onion sets that did a bit better; we always use up however many onions we grow, so if we come up with good technique we could scale it up.

I enlarged the garden early in the season, and upgraded the fence as time went on this summer. The construction now consists of 5/4×6 PT decking set edgewise and buried 1-2″ below grade, with economy cattle panels from TSC set above it, screwed to 4×4 PT posts on 16′ spacing. This construction replaces an amalgam of slabwood, chicken wire, plastic netting, and untreated tree trunks we originally put in, which had rusted and rotted into the ground over the last 10 years. The fence is a bit extravagant, but we spend a lot of time up there and it’s a pleasure to use. I can run the BMX-bike wheelhoe right up against the boards on the inside. That wheelhoe has been a revelation; with it I was able to keep the entire ~1/6 acre from growing up in weeds with 10 minutes here and there. For finer work I used a regular straight hoe and a small Japanese hand-weeder that my mom gave me; Kelsey uses a small Korean hand plow.

The edgewise decking at the base of the fence similarly resists the string trimmer on the outside, and the cattle panel is good for trellising crops, allowing us to use the soil right up to the edge of the garden. In exposed places I’ve strung three strands of 17ga steel fence wire above the cattle panels to discourage deer, and I lived in fear that we would get coons in the corn and I’d need to add an electric element, but thankfully they never found us.

As the weather warmed and the crops started to come in I had less time to put the finishing touches on the fence, and as a result my crop of butternut squash was badly damaged by woodchucks; as is I got maybe half a bushel and we have a bunch still in the freezer from past years so we’ll manage fine for pies. We also grew the usual zucchini and summer squash, and as usual it produced well before getting nasty with mildew and beetles. The revelation this year in cucurbits came from a garden-center packet of light-green pattypan squash; I planted one hill of these and it took off like a rocket. It spread out into a jungle maybe 12′ in diameter that produced an absurd amount of squash, and unlike the single-threaded zucchinis it had a persistent branching habit that survived several attempts to cut it back out of the aisles. Also unlike zucchini it seemed unfazed by the bugs and mold, and produced continually until the weather got cold. With the warm dry weather we also managed to grow some quality cantaloupes and a few watermelons, trellised along the garden fence.

Other crops reliably did their thing – tomatoes, green beans, sugarsnap peas, etc. Southern Maine was dry this summer, and we irrigated a fair amount. We have a pretty good system now, using the sort of oscillating lawn sprinklers that have a bow-shaped metal tube with a series of jets pressed into it. The sprinkler is screwed to a short piece of decking, with a rectangular wooden tube about a foot long screwed to the underside of the decking. The tube slots down over a wooden post driven into the soil, setting it at about head-height, above the tomatoes and peas. The garden is long and narrow, so one sprinkler can manage the entire width of the garden, and six or seven posts allow us to move the sprinkler to successively water the entire area. Kelsey also does a fair amount of hand-watering, which keeps the weeds down in the aisles, and we have some drip tube here and there.

I think that about covers my ‘lessons learned’ from a summer of serious gardening – we’ll see what next season brings…