The First Summer!!!! My Annual Garden Review For 2021
I bet you thought that all of the exclamation points in this title were happy, joyous, triumphant ones. But I made some solid garden mistakes this year. And although experimentation and growing is always a joy, you can probably re-read those as shouting, exasperated exclamation points.
Let’s take a look at what happened.
First, a quick summary.
First let me say that I gardened my little ass off this year. You will not be able to tell by this post. But this was the most gardening I’ve done in my entire life.
With that said, you should know that our compost pile grew more feed than I did and it’s an inanimate object. It grew about 12 butternut squashes on accident, from seeds that were meant to be thrown away. I got about 3 in my actual garden. Otherwise, I got a ton of zucchini and a lot of Flambo beans. I got some potatoes and about 3 squashes and 1 pumpkin. I also got a random kale plant that I didn’t know I planted.
This may sound like a lot, and it was truly beautiful, but our growing space is huge–capable of so much more. Most of our tomato and corn plants died as they were knocked down by other plants seeking sun or nutrients. Several plants–carrots, greens, luffa, brussel sprouts, cabbage–didn’t grow at all. I was both pleased with everything we did get, and sad about everything that we didn’t.
Here’s where I think we went wrong:
I didn’t write anything down… And therefore, I did not weed.
I think it’s hard for me to equate gardening with stringent documentation. I’m out here to be FREEEEEE. And so I do very little to actually write down what I’m doing–and I definitely don’t make notes as to what I planted where. But what I learned as I’ve worked on Season 2 of Was Is Could Be is that some of the best farmers actually keep daily diaries. In fact, Gerrit Smith Miller, the man credited with bringing holstein-friesian cattle to the United States and a Madison County native, kept arduous notes on his cattle and their production–so much so that he eventually documented that he could create near-modern-day production levels in his grass-fed cows–without the corn-fed, antibiotic BS (‘cuz this was like, 100 years ago).
Woah–what a tangent. ANYWAYS, not writing things down made it so that I had very little understanding of what to expect when a plant started to germinate–which also meant that I was allowing weeds to germinate until I could tell exactly what they were. Because I hadn't written anything down, and because I was using Hugelkultur beds, and because I was new to gardening and didn't know what those plants looked like as wee baby plants, I was not able to distinguish between the weeds and the plants. In the end, I just let it all go. I let the weeds and plants grow together so that I could figure out what was actually a crop and what was a weed by whether or not it bore fruit. There is a biblical parable about this that I can’t remember right now. The TL;DR: it worked but it was not ideal. Next year, I’m taking notes!
I over-grew by a long shot.
You guyssssss… I got greedy this year. Like, super greedy. Having Hugelkultur beds made it really easy to overplant (I talk about it more in my Hugelkultur post).
It wasn’t just the beds though. I also didn’t realize how some of the plants grew. I specifically had a number of squashes that vined out everywhere, when I thought that they would stay largely put. They ended up taking a lot of nutrients from other plants and causing other issues. My Georgia Candy Roaster squashes, for example, ended up growing up, and eventually pulling down, all of my tomatoes. Next year–I need to trellis and clip so that these squashes stay in one area. I also need to generally learn more about what I’m growing.
I didn’t pick the right spot for the garden or the plants therein.
And this one is a real doozy. We built our garden in the middle of the woods, where the previous homeowners had a garden. We chatted with them about why and they shared that it was simply too wet anywhere else on the property. They had lived here for 25 years, so we trusted their judgment. I still do BUT… the garden we had in mind was far larger. When we designed and built it, we were building in early spring, when the trees hadn’t leafed and we had plenty of light. Not knowing the property, and not doing any due diligence on this front, we didn’t realize that we weren’t going to have the sun we needed for most of the plants we were choosing, once the leaves filled out.
Once we realized the issue, we tried to combat it by planting more shade and cold-loving plants. Joke was on us. To add insult to injury, a lot of the plants that I didn’t think wanted the sun, still gravitated toward it, pushing against all of the plants that did need the sun. Those damn, delicious Georgia Candy Roasters are a great example; we didn’t think they would mind less direct sunlight, but they crawled the tomatoes to get to the brighter parts of the garden, it seemed. It’s a good thing they’re exceptionally delicious squash or else I would have been devastated by the tomato loss.
Garden structure is a double-edged sword.
At this point, our garden is pretty dug in. When we designed it this spring, I specifically insisted on some infrastructure to ensure that it would remain animal free. We used large timbers to build posts. We dug the fenceline into the ground. It is basically a beautiful, see-through fortress.
Which means we basically can’t move it into the sun, without doing a shitload of work. Brad had originally suggested we do t-posts and built a much more malleable fence. Let this be the only written record of me saying that he may have been right. I’m not sure if that would have introduced different problems, but I can appreciate how mobile it would have made things.
That said, to combat our shade issue, the best viable solution seems to be removing trees to create more sunlight. There are specifically 3 trees that are causing the issue, and with our propensity to reuse items elsewhere on the property, I don’t feel like it would be a huge detriment or waste to take them down. The question is when and how…
It’s worth noting that I write this post with a lot of plans for next year, a year that we’re also getting married. I’m excited to have a better sense of this property and I’m hopeful that we can make meaningful strides. But please folks, don’t hold your collective breaths.