Lessons learned for next year

Thursday, 14 Aug 08 (posted about 3 months ago) Cloudy 25°C / 77°F

I’ve been a bit disappointed in my garden this year. My husband has been encouraging me to view the things I’m disappointed about as data on which to base future decision making (rather than as devastating personal flaws). So, in that spirit, here are the things I have learned so far from Tiny Farm, and ideas I have for next year.

Do not plant peppers. I think pepper plants are pretty, and they seem like something one should grow, but I have no use for them. My husband and I rarely eat or use peppers, whether sweet or hot. I might consider growing one hot pepper for use in making my homemade pepper spray for pest control.

Plant more beans, and plant more beans at the same time. I succession planted beans, 3 seeds per week for about 5-6 weeks. That’s not nearly enough beans, either total or ready at the same time.

Plant pole beans. I did not want to bother with a trellis this year, so I planted bush beans. Given my space constraints, this was not an optimal decision. Pole beans would make more efficient use of space.

May is not too late for spinach. I read that one should plant spinach and other greens in spring when it’s not too hot. I figured May and early June were too hot. As it turned out, my neighbor planted spinach in May and it was just fine.

Do not plant squash. The SVBs will kill it and make me sad, and I cannot justify the yield per square foot. I don’t have the room for it, and it’s available quite cheaply and plentifully at the farmer’s market.

Do more broadcast sowing. I very carefully planted my bunching onions in a straight line, one seed at a time, spaced 2 inches apart. Only 2 of them came up, and they looked pathetic and never really grew. I suspect that bunching onions (and probably other veggies) like to be crowded, I would have benefited by broadcasting (or in my small space, sprinkling) them and then thinning them.

Do not be afraid to thin. This is similar to the above. The square foot gardening approach encourages you to plant your seeds so that you can avoid thinning. I adhered to this rigidly. But the trouble is that if something doesn’t germinate, or dies, or gets eaten by a bird, you have no backup. So next year I will plant more, and I will not be afraid to thin. Thinnings are just snacks.

Do not use tomato cages for tomatoes. Tomato cages suck at holding up tomatoes. I’ve been growing tomatoes in containers, using cages, for 10 or so years – I know this. And yet I keep using them. I really need to stop it. It’s disappointing and demoralizing. So this winter I vow to research trellising and/or staking options for tomatoes.

Do use tomato cages for other plants. My peppers, podding radishes and squash would have benefited from a tomato cage. I suspect that red orach and peas would also benefit from one.

Do not go to Home Depot or Lowes for dirt. In fact, don’t go there for anything. The ones in my area are geared toward no-work outside landscape “solutions”. They are good places to buy dyed bark, half-dead evergreen shrubs and outdoor furniture (ick, ick and no room). Neither one sells organic dirt or real compost. Lowes does sell something it calls leaf compost, but it has bark chunks as big as my thumb in it, for crying out loud.

Always buy 10-15% more soil and soil amendments than I think I will need. Because most likely I’ll need more, if not right away than in a week or two.

Make room for alliums. I have long thought that alliums have no place in a small garden, but that’s wrong. There are all kinds of small alliums that would be great to have in my garden. I want to try shallots, green garlic, green onions and perhaps leeks. It’s probably true that alliums grown for storage have no place in a small garden.

Buy some Bt and use it. Imported cabbage moths are well established throughout the piedmont region, and I adore brassicas. I need to buy and use Bt.

Make more compost. It really is true that you will use all you make. Lee Reich has a suggestion in Weedless Gardening about how to compost indoors in the winter using buckets and peat. Investigate that (vermicomposting is out, I tried it and Mr. Katxena didn’t like it).

Go off the grid. The grid is a very important part of the square foot gardening method, but I don’t like it. I’m going to remove mine. The grid is supposed to encourage you to (among other things) plant more plants, but I felt like it had the opposite effect on me. I planted fewer plants than I wanted to because the grid discourages planting in interstitial spaces.

Think carefully about yield. Plant things that will provide a reasonable return on the time and space they occupy in the garden. For example, as tasty as my carrots are, they may not be worth the time and space they require, especially when I would like more beets.

Do not be afraid. The worst thing that can happen is that I’ll try something and it won’t work. How bad is that? So next year I will try to be more experimental.

I’m sure there are more, but that’s all I can think of now.

lessons

Want to comment?

Matangie wrote:
This was my first year gardening so I have many lessons of my own (some of them the same!). Row covers also work well for some pest problems. They can stay on brassisca’s all summer and can protect young squash from borers (you’ll have to remove it so that the squash flowers pollinate, though). I’m going to try it next year since I had a MAJOR infestation of cabbage moths. Plus my garden is in a community garden so I would have to keep my plants positively dripping with sprays to convince the bugs that it’s not worth flying the 2 feet from the next plot.

Posted on 15 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)
Katxena wrote:
Matangie, you might want to look into Bt. It’s a naturally occurring bacteria that organic gardeners have been using for decades to control cabbage worms, among other things. It’s a little bit controversial because some big companies have been genetically engineering plants to express the same toxins Bt creates, which is creepy and weird. I’ve never used it before, but am comfortable doing so.

I looked into row covers, but decided against them because I like hanging out in the garden and looking at it. I think the row covers would make me a bit sad.

Posted on 15 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)
Vera Marie wrote:
Love your list. I’ve been gardening, on and off, since I was big enough to pull a weed. But I have never journaled before. I never realized how much it would affect the way I think about my gardens. I would learn lessons, but not apply them. Then, within a year or two I would just think, that didn’t work and go off to something totally different.

Like you, I now find myself thinking about what works and what doesn’t. Next year will be the test of whether I appropriately apply those lessons. I suppose by the end of the summer I will be posting a list that’s much like yours. Only geared towards flowers.

Posted on 15 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)
Nax wrote:
Great list— I’m thinking of having it laminated! Before I found Folia, I always used (and still use) this great garden journal=. But the thing is, I buy it for NEXT YEAR, and I write this stuff down on the “do” date for next year. That way, when I open up “2nd week of june” I’ll see not only “plant tomatos” but also “use trellis instead of cage”

(btw, the book is not specific to Illinois, despite the title, and is always available used “like new” on Amazon)

Posted on 15 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)
Katied L wrote:
i need to make my list soon….or should have been doing this all along. your lessons are great lessons, some of which i’ve learned myself. so much to learn each season.

Posted on 15 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)
Ceae wrote:
Great list Kat, your last point is the most important one for everyone to adhere to!

Posted on 15 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)
Matangie wrote:
Katxena, I had heard of Bt but, in general, I don’t want to use a chemical if a simple barrier will do the trick. Aesthetics are less important to me than productivity. For one thing, my garden is in a community garden so it’s a five minute walk to get there which means that I don’t hang out there quite as much as I would like to. Just wanted to make sure you know your options. :-) Also, I read recently that radishes interplanted with squash are supposed to keep borers away. Probably wouldn’t fix the problem but might help a little.

Posted on 15 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)
Wenjomatic wrote:
Excellent documenting… because if you’re like me, I’d surely forget. Nice list!

Posted on 15 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)
Katxena wrote:
Thanks everyone. My husband giggled for hours over the second sentence.

@Vera Marie: Folia has helped me so much. By writing about my garden, I find that I have a different relationship with it. And having a place for a list like this is really helpful.

@Nax: That journal looks cool. I need to start looking at the task function here. It would be cool to have a task set up for next June that says “you bozo, knock it off with the cages already!”

@Katied L: I’ll look forward to seeing your (and others!) lists!

@Ceae: thanks for the encouragement. For some reason, I’m much more fearful when it comes to my garden than I am in other endeavors. I’m working on a quilt right now where I’m ignoring one very important piece of advice that all my quilting friends agree on. But I know that doing it the “wrong” way is right for this quilt, and right for me. I need to be brave like that with gardening too.

@Matangie: Thanks for the suggestion. I envy your community plot. They are very hard to come by here. The closest one to me is in a city I don’t live in, so I can’t even get on a waiting list. I have to show up on sign-up day and see if there’s any left. For two years in a row now, there haven’t been.

@Wen: I would totally forget. My memory is not very good.

Posted on 15 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)
Verthandei wrote:
Love your list – I need to make (a better) one too. Re: thinning – it’s tough to pull up the babies, that’s for sure… how do you think I ended up with seven roma tomato plants? (Although in all fairness, only four of them are doing exceptionally well.) :)

Posted on 16 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)
Katxena wrote:
Thinning is hard, which is why I’m trying to view them as snacks. I like snacks. :)

Posted on 16 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)
Sparky Klystron wrote:
The comment about Lowe’s and Home Depot is hilarious.
And all too true.

Posted on 18 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)
Katxena wrote:
Some people seem to be able to get good things at HD and Lowes, but I never do. I guess it must be regional.

Posted on 18 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)
Matt Middleton wrote:
A lot of this is really great advice. I think your insights in to planting could be summed up thusly: Plant what you like to eat and/or look at.

Also, I second your comment about Lowe’s and Home Despot – they’re mostly useless.

Posted on 19 Aug 08 (about 3 months ago)