Reflections on another year of serious gardening (2023)

Hello again world! With more time on my hands this summer (but operating solo now that KFK is afloat), I’ve been wrestling with the strange weather of this year to grow vegetables. Here are some notes so far:

• After a seriously dry spell in the spring, June and July turned stubbornly rainy and humid; this is the headline impact on Maine gardening for the year. The river which usually shrinks to the size of a small stream for most of the summer remained in spring-like torrent mode, with occasional bursts out of its bank in response to 2-3″ rainstorms. The grass was brown briefly in May, but has been as green as Ireland for the entire summer since.
• Naturally I was worried about the strawberries, especially since I didn’t manage to get straw under them in the spring, but somehow they put out a decent crop with only a bit more mold and mud than usual; we froze maybe ~20 quarts and jammed most of the frozen remainder from 2022, which was a more prolific year. With more time for diligence, I did manage to police the beds for weeds a few times, so they look pretty good for next year.
• Given family enthusiasm, this year I planted 3 different maturities of shell peas in addition to the usual sugarsnaps. Unsurprisingly given the weather they did well; we had fresh peas from late June right into August. Most went right down the hatch before even being cooked, including a consistent dose shelled fresh in preschool lunch every day, but I froze maybe a quart. We ate the sugarsnaps fresh as usual; I haven’t found that blanching and freezing them results in an appetizing product.
• Beyond the weather my biggest antagonist was a family of woodchucks; they hopped right through the holes in the cattle panel fencing on a bee-line and devastated the peas and brassicas early in the season. I fought a running battle stapling up 1″ chicken wire (“poultry netting”) over the lower half of the cattle panels; while I didn’t entirely encircle the garden, I started closest to their den, and it seemed to dissuade them – or other stuff sprouted in the woods that they like better. I am still working to gradually upgrade the entire perimeter by applying the chicken wire to each panel, such that if the panel is removed, the netting comes with it and the whole assembly can be transported/reapplied easily.
  • In the process of doing this fencing work I discovered hog ring pliers which take strips like an Arrow stapler; can’t believe I made it this many decades without realizing these were so handy.
• Given the damage from the woodchucks, my broccoli and brussels sprouts were a sad affair; I ended up buying a couple of six-packs from a nursery to patch in the ones that were too badly chomped. Finally here in September I’m getting some broccoli; it remains to be seen how far the brussels sprouts will get before the snow flies. I started fall broccoli which has hit the fast part of its growth cycle, so hoping to freeze a couple more gallon bags of florets for pizza before the season ends.
• Alliums were so/so. Garlic did its usual thing, producing scapes and then dying back for harvest in time for its bed to be given over to late broccoli and lettuce. I doubled down on leeks, planting approximately 70 row feet of a couple of varieties; they did fine but haven’t sized up that impressively given that I started them in the greenhouse early and gave them a couple rounds of compost. Onions were more disappointing. After a tremendous harvest of prime softball-sized storage onions last year that carried us right into the summer, I thought I had the recipe down: I planted individual seeds of a couple varieties (yellow and red) in individual 200-cell plastic trays, nursed them in the greenhouse with organic liquid fertilizer, and planted healthy starts on 8″ centers in a well-fertilized bed. I even collared each one with cut-up toilet paper roll tubes that I’d been diligently saving all winter, to keep the cutworms at bay. They appeared to grow OK, but didn’t size up nearly so well as last year – baseballs at best, which I suspect is just down to the weather. I think commercial onions are grown in the sunny parts of the northwest, suggesting that the cloudy summer may be to blame.
• Summer-bearing raspberries were OK; nothing spectacular, but Z ate plenty fresh, and I managed to freeze 2-3 quarts. I gave them a ton of composted manure and buried it with fresh sawdust from the bandsaw mill that we hired for a day this spring; next year’s canes are a good 18″ taller than this year’s, which may be related and a good sign. Fall-bearers are just starting now and look normal.
• Tomatoes have suffered badly. They appeared to grow normally, but were extremely slow to set fruit, and likewise slow to ripen. The tomatoes in the greenhouse have been marginally healthier/earlier, but not by any significant margin. This makes me think that they need sun more than heat. As of the first week of September I have perhaps only harvested 15-20lb total; they are starting to come in heavier now that the sun and heat have come on; we’ll see how much we get before it turns cold. Fortunately I overdid it last year and still have several quarts of diced in reserve.
  • Peppers and eggplants were likewise slow to grow and miserly with fruit (even in the greenhouse and hoophouse), again making me think that sunlight was the missing factor.
• Continuing in the theme of hot-weather annuals, basil is a commodity crop for us, and it did pretty well. I plant ~8 sq feet in the greenhouse and ~30 sq feet outdoors, and as usual the greenhouse patch was more rampant, but both produced respectably. I make large batches of pesto, freeze it in ice cube trays, and pop the frozen cubes loose into plastic bags, aiming to put up 2 or 3 gallons to make it through the winter. Often it starts to brown and dry up by now, but the late burst of heat and humidity seem to suit its continued growth.
• Squash family crops did relatively poorly; we got a good run of pattypans early, but the plants fizzled out (though that’s not unusual). I planted a couple hills of spaghetti squash, and they set and sized fruit impressively, but then the vines died before the fruit could ripen – we’ll get maybe a half-dozen big ones, and it’s not clear if they really matured. Waltham butternut did better; the vines still look OK, some fruit is mature, and some are still coming. I planted a couple of hills of Connecticut field pumpkins, and they made a good showing with several respectable jack-o-lanterns turning orange now.
  • The real standout of the squash family was the ‘Zephyr’ summer squash variety; it’s a yellow summer squash with a mildly crook-ed neck and a light green blossom end. Those plants are still kicking out fruits long after everything else has turned mildew-y and dried out. The flavor is fine and they are plenty tender if picked at a reasonable size.
  • I was able to grow a handful of really nice cantaloupes, mostly in the greenhouse. The eggplants and peppers I planted in there didn’t do much, so I let the cantaloupe vines run rampant to the point where they started to take on even the tomato plants.
  • Cucumbers produced respectably; we don’t make pickles so there’s only so much to be done with them.
• Potatoes look OK; they are taking their time dying back, but I don’t know if this will translate into high yield. The couple of hills of white potatoes that Z and I have dug up had some with internal voids (not rotten); hopefully this doesn’t extend to the other varieties.
• Carrots and beets have done their thing; nothing apparently unusual. I have tried to keep successions of carrots going, though the ones I overwintered last year ended up small and tough. I did get a good crop of parsnips this spring which lasted us for muffins most of the summer; this year germination wasn’t as good so I expect a smaller number of monsters come next spring.
• Greens were sufficient to our needs; by sporadic succession plantings there was always something to make salad out of. I had quite a bit of overwintered spinach that did well enough that we ate a ton of Greek omelets and and was able to freeze some early in the season; will try for this again by planting repeatedly as the fall progresses.
• Asparagus produced nicely, and put up a very strong stand of fronds, to the point where I wonder if I should be dividing the clumps or something – need to look that up.
• It wasn’t a big year for grain staples; we didn’t do field or sweet corn, and planted fewer potatoes. I did have about 1000 sq feet of fedco winter wheat I planted (with red clover) last fall on the patch that had grown potatoes last summer; the stand wasn’t particularly thick, and the wet weather of the spring didn’t seem to agree with it. I did harvest it (with scissors, not the grain cradle I improvised for rye the previous year, as it was thin and weedy) – it’s drying in the attic, and we’ll see if I ‘make my seed corn back’. I have heard that spring wheat is more common in Maine, so at some point I should try that, but so far corn and rye have been much more successful. The red clover has subsequently put up a nice stand so at least there’s the nitrogen gain from that.
• Total fertility input at this point has stabilized to 3cy of ‘Surf and Turf’ from Odonals each spring, plus the compost output from kitchen, yard, and garden. I spread finished compost and S&T by pailfuls onto the beds, fluff it in with a Johnny’s broadfork, and rake the beds smooth before planting. The small rear-tine gas tiller we bought used died years ago, and for the established beds I don’t miss it, though I don’t have a ready solution if it came time to turn over some stout sod.
• Weed control is fairly refined at this point between the BMX-bike-derived oscillating wheel-hoe, a long-handled Eliot Coleman collinear hoe with a 7″ blade, and a small Japanese hand hoe.
• Pest control consists of I’ve settled on 1, occasionally 2 applications of spinosad on the potatoes to control beetles when I first see the nasty grubs feeding, which this seems to do the trick, and 2-3 mistings of Bt on the brassicas, which keeps the green worms pretty much in check.