Kelly Rossiter
DCL
Yes, those straggly little beauties are my entire tomato harvest. It's pathetic, I know. I had planted my tomatoes plants in terra cotta pots so that I could transfer them to the cottage in July and eat them in August. But my garden is, to put it politely, slightly overgrown, and the pots got lost in all the surrounding growth and I had forgotten about them. When I finally did find them in September when I arrived home from our sojourn at the cottage, the plant was taller than I am and had wasted all of it's energy growing high enough to surpass the height of the surrounding foliage.
I learned a lot from my little urban experiment this summer and I'm going to try again next year (you can tell I'm a true gardener) hopefully with better results. Here are some of my vegetable garden resolutions.
1. I'm going to create more growing space for vegetables My husband dubbed my little vegetable plot "the coffin" so that gives you a pretty accurate idea of it's size. I have had problems for years with a particularly pernicious weed called goutweed. This nasty thing has choked out so many of my more delicate, gorgeous flowers over the years that it makes me want to cry just to think about it. It is a constant battle to pull it out, but now that I spend so much of my summer away from home, goutweed has become the victor. As it turned out, the vegetables fared quite nicely against the goutweed and that little plot was just about the only place in the garden it didn't take over again this year. So next year I'll do a bit of flower transplanting a make a bigger plot, rather than buying more flowers.
2. I'm going to plant everything farther apart I suspect this is a mistake that many first time vegetable gardeners make. My daughter and I were practically giddy with the choices of what to plant, so we probably chose too much and therefore put things too close together. I should have known from my many years of flower gardening that those sweet little shoots will grow into monster plants, but sometimes experience flies out the window in the face of pepper plants. We ended up without harvesting a single beet or radish because the surrounding plants grew faster and completely shaded them.
3. I'm going to stake everything properly I have to confess that I was a bit lazy about this aspect of my garden. Both the peas and the green beans should have been staked rather than just letting them climb the little fence we had put around the plot to keep the dog out. The vegetables need some air circulation so that they don't go moldy on the plant, and of course, you need to be able to see them to pick them.
4. I'm going to search out pest-resistant varieties The only vegetable that was really affected by pests was the swiss chard, but boy did the slugs love it. There's no way I'm going to use any pesticide on my garden, so that means picking the slugs off by hand, and realistically, I'm just not going to do that. Interestingly enough, the slugs were totally uninterested in the lettuce. There was some earwig damage to other plants, but not enough to worry too much about, but who knows what they will do next year.
5. I'm going to remember to take my pots of tomatoes to the cottage I would love to plant a garden at the cottage, but the land we are on is essentially rock with a couple of inches of earth on top of it. There are some areas on the lake where planting is possible and a few people have tried to make a go of it. A neighbor woke one morning to find that a moose had stepped over the fence she had built to keep out smaller animals and was happily having his breakfast. Our friends the Johnsons live on the lake all year round and are trying to grow all of their own vegetables. Elizabeth Johnson told me that she produced 83 jars of preserves this fall to see her family through the winter. She searched out other ways to get crops she cannot grow in her region. She is an artist and has bartered a painting for her summer supply of strawberries, peaches, pears and apples from a farmer in the Niagara region, which is the prime fruit growing belt in Ontario. When I'm away from my garden at home, I'll just have to keep stopping by our vegetable lady, and keep stocking my kitchen with her fabulous produce.
