Stairway Complete; Fruit & Vegetable Season Begins

Ten Early Lessons from our First Year of Gardening

The first year of gardening for self-sufficiency is often, or so we understand, marked with, shall we say, "noble failures." It is a time for learning valuable lessons for the next season. If we were planning to be wholly self-sufficient, and if society were to break down today leaving us with only the food that our humble homestead in the suburbs could produce, we'd be starving by November. 

The lessons we've learned thus far include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Squash sometimes gets a fungus, and a crop that started out promisingly can be reduced to three iffy, tiny Turk's turbans, three zucchini, and a couple of pumpkins that might actually make it, if we are lucky.
2. Sweet corn is a big waste of space. The amount of space required, in our case two and a half of our eight 8x4 beds, compared to the amount of food that it produces is far too much to justify. We have reaped a few, paltry, mutant ears of corn, after painfully starting the corn indoors in March, planting it in late April, sheltering it from a late May frost. Disappointing.
3. It is not a good idea to plant a strip of "bee feed" flowers in the middle of each 8x4 bed. The problem with this is the obligatory May and June downpours that wash the seeds in unpredictable directions. This makes it difficult to discern weeds or flowers from, say, beets or cabbage. Not weeding because you're afraid to lose flowers leads to plants being choked out.
4. It's a good idea to thin your carrots if you don't want them to look like mutant Daleks from Dr. Who.
5. 12" terracotta pots are way to small to support a tomato plants. You need to water them 2x a day if you don't want your painstakingly sprouted-from-seed seedlings to whither and die under the steaming summer sun.
6. Peppers take forever.
7. The "double-digging" method does not actually mean that you can plant 2x as many plants in the space available. It is, in light of the "no dig bed" method that we recently saw explained on BBC's Gardener's World with host Monty Don, a bif fat waste of back-breaking effort.
8. Giant sunflowers (while very cool, and providing a really neat looking bed that does wonders for bringing goldfinches, cardinals, and bees into the yard) will choke out, rather than provide a living pole for your cucumbers to climb.
9. Spinach, if not monitored closely, will go to seed rapidly.
10. A very small patch of lettuce is needed to provide a constant supply of salad. If you over-plant, salad becomes something of a chore to eat 5 or 6 nights a week.

Given our manifest failures, you might get the impression that our garden has been an unmitigated disaster. Not so.

We are harvesting zucchini, we do have three pumpkins on the vine and four cantaloupe. Our lettuce, mentioned above, has been tremendously successful. Our potatoes, growing in bags, are still promising. The basil, companion planted with the tomatoes, is doing great. The tomatoes are thriving. While we'd hoped to produce enough to can (so far we have been able to keep up with eating them fresh), they are definitely among our successes.

In spite of our setbacks, some home remains at the half-way point in August.

--Tom