Our garden has been growing away the last few weeks, and Tom and I have already learned some lessons that we'll have to work around next year.
First of all... Buy carrot seeds as seed tapes, rather than randomly sprinkling seeds. Our garden is so overrun with carrots, we had to pull some so that they didn't crowd each other out! And when I say "we" had to pull some, I mean my dad pulled them for me!
Some sort of flock of birds keeps eating our peas! I think we'll have to develop some sort of net system to keep them out next year. We only got peas for a couple weeks before the birds ransacked the vines clean!
Pretty much everything develops spines! Even the shafts on our lettuce has developed spines! They aren't as sharp as the cucumber prickles, but equally surprising! We have so much lettuce... Last week, Tom picked enough lettuce for six of us to have salads for dinner, and you couldn't even tell that he'd cut anything out of the lettuce patch! The lettuce is also very tasty-- I think we'll grow it again next year!
The animals in our neighbourhood are relentless. For the first few weeks of August, we were reveling in a huge abundance of the most delicious and tomatoey tomatoes I have ever tasted... And then... The squirrels discovered they are delicious, and the magpies discovered they are delicious. Now there are half-eaten tomatoes all over our fence, and I find myself banging on our glass patio door, trying to scare animals away on a regular basis. And one particularly cheeky squirrel is totally unfazed by the banging. He darts off for a few minutes, and then comes right back!
Our zucchini plants keep falling ill with some sort of mold or mildew. Little white patches have been growing on all the leaves. So far, we've only gotten to eat one zucchini, and SOMETHING (PROBABLY THAT DAMN SQUIRREL) took a bite out of the other one that is growing in the garden!
Green beans grow from the loveliest little purple flowers. And green beans, unlike the yellow wax beans we grew last year, do not grow upwards in vines. The plants stay relatively small, compared to what we've previously seen!
And finally, sometimes letting your toddler randomly pick seed packages works out really well. Lacey latched on to a package of mixed flowers when we were at Lowe's, and she insisted that we buy it for the garden. After she wildly sprinkled the seeds into the garden, I had a really tough time telling what were flowers, and what were weeds when they started to grow. It seems like I did a pretty good job of leaving the flowers in place! We have quite a nice collection of purple, blue, white, yellow and orange flowers now!
I'm hoping that I can pickle some carrots or beans this year-- I really enjoyed them last year!
No comments:
Post a Comment