As the average first frost date for our location is less
than two months away, I thought this would be a good time to tell you how the
biggest garden – 1600 square feet – I’ve ever had has fared this summer. I’ll
keep the berries, since they are perennial and generally do well, out of the
picture and focus on the rest.
Successes
1. Peas: As we had a cooler than usual spring, and the warm
weather took longer than usual to get here, we got more peas than ever before
for a spring planting. Not a huge amount – I didn’t plant that many – but
enough to give several salads a nice, sweet crunch. They do better in the
autumn here, however.
1. Green beans: Green beans prefer warmth, but not the heat
of Deep South summers. But because the 90+degree F weather was so long in
coming this spring and summer, I harvested – and we ate – an unprecedented
amount of beans. They kept growing flowers, which became beans, then more
flowers, which became more beans. I didn’t even have that many plants, maybe
sixteen or so?
3. Okra: I quit harvesting them, because none of us like
them that well, and they make such a sticky mess both to cut them off the plant
and to slice them up. That’s not to mention how the leaves make me itch, worse
than green bean leaves!
I am not going to grow okra anymore, unless I want to grow
one or two plants for fun in front of the house just for the beauty of the
flowers. Nevertheless, I have harvested, sliced, and dehydrated a good many of
that Southern fruit. Now, dozens of fruit continue to grow.
4. Chinese long beans: I also have a good bit of dehydrated
Chinese long beans. During the winter, I plan to once in a while sauté these
with some okra slices – after rehydrating both. But I’m not sure I’m going to
grow this veggie again, either. They don’t taste very much like green beans,
their flavor being much stronger. The flowers, however, are beautiful, and the
purple beans can grow to over a foot and a half long.
6. Tomatoes: I haven’t been able to keep up with them,
having planted thirty plants donated to us by a neighbor back in May. I
dehydrated them for awhile, but now we just eat fresh when we want, and I fix a
tomato soup a couple times a week. It’s sad all the fruit that is rotting on
the vine, but I’m not going to can, and it’s gotten too humid to dehydrate via
the power of the sun.
7. Cucumbers: So successful that I’ve cut down three of the
four plants I started with! Actually, three were a variety called Yamato Extra
Long, and once the plants developed powdery mildew the fruit all turned out
bitter.
Next year I will spray Plant Wash to keep the mildew away.
This year I was too stressed out by all the adjusting my family has had to make
in this new lifestyle, not to mention frequently lethargic thanks to the very
humid summer. So I didn’t want to do anything extra, like spray.
8. Watermelon: Well, this was semi-successful. Eventually,
the plant developed a disease that caused malformations and under-ripening of
fruit. I finally tore it out, but nobody cared. I discovered I can’t eat it
without experiencing overly soft stools and cramping the next day, so I’m not
going to eat it anymore. J got sick of it, and B never liked dealing with all
the seeds.
9. Crenshaw melon: We’ve had a few duds lately, but up until
then this cantaloupe-like fruit (bigger and sweeter) has produced enough so
that we saw a noticeable decrease in our food expenditure for about a month.
There are still a few fruit that look like they are going to ripen well, but I
think that will be the end of it – it seems to have developed a disease, as
well.
10. New Zealand spinach: Growing a watermelon and the NZ spinach
proved to me that sandy soil is better than the clay soil I used to have to
deal with. Watermelon wouldn’t grow for me at all in North Texas, and it would
take at least two years for a New Zealand plant to grow as big as the four
plants I got in the garden this year became.
11. Red malabar spinach: A no-brainer for hot climates.
While two of the four original plants succumbed to rotting due to the mud
underneath the hay (I’ll talk about that in a later post), the two that
survived went crazy and covered a cedar post that is part of the trellis.
12. Lettuce: I should have put this at the beginning! Since
I was unable to start plants this year, and the freezing weather took forever
to end, I ended up buying starts from the hardware store. It felt like forever
before they were big enough to pick from, but once they were, I was able to
stop buying lettuce for a good two months. I ended up with eleven plants,
consisting of both leaf and Romaine types.
Failures
1. All the brassicas – kale, broccoli, cabbage. I
had a hard time getting them started from seed (like I would leave the trays of
seeds in the rain and end up with a flooded muddy mess), and those I seeded in
the ground didn’t fare much better because we didn’t have a lot of water in our
tanks back then and I refused to use what precious little we had to water
seeds.
So by the time the few that came up, came up, it was too hot
for them.
2. Other greens: Flea beetles attacked the beet greens. I
did manage to get a couple servings of collard greens, but since they developed
aphids much sooner than they ever had in Texas, I consider them a failure. Only
three spinach ever germinated, due to my not watering the seeds. And it was too
late by then – I got a few leaves a couple of times, and then the plants went
to seed.
3. Jalapeno peppers: I had one out of six plants ever
produce anything for me. The fruit have been small and pathetic, though they
taste okay.
4. Bell peppers: Did even worse than the hot. The one pepper
that grew began to rot when it was almost all red. The plants have new buds and
flowers on them once again, and look as healthy as they ever have (I thought
they were all going to die in May – leaves were turning yellow and falling off
so that the plants looked skeletal), but I’m not going to hold my breath.
I figured out that peppers do not like a lot of water and
cool weather, hot or bell. The reason this new batch of flowers may produce
something is that we’ve finally had a couple of weeks without rain.
5. Amarillo carrots: This is a variety of carrot that can be
grown in the summer. But every time the greens would pop out of the ground, the
darn pill bugs would eat them up! I decided growing carrots the old-fashioned
way, in cool weather, is the way I’ll have to go.
In a couple of weeks, I’ll post about the gardening lessons
I learned this year. In a couple of months, I’ll let you know whether the bell
peppers ever did anything, and how the sweet potatoes turned out. If all the
slips that turned into vines bore the amount of potatoes they are supposed to,
we will end up with about 100 pounds of potatoes!
However, I’m not sure how well the roots will have developed
in the rocky soil. I may have to build a raised bed to successfully produce
sweet potatoes.
Thanks for reading this post, and stay tuned for more! :)
