What I’ve Learned in the Garden This Year

Spring this year heralded the beginning of a surprisingly steep learning curve for me.  We’re only halfway through the main growing season, and yet it’s been such a different experience out there, I feel like I should get it down now.

The first lesson I’ve learned has actually taken a couple of years to sink in.  That is, prepare your garden bed in the fall.  In the late summer, when the bed was getting overgrown with grass, and the harvest was coming to a stuttering halt, I used to neglect my garden out of sheer guilt and leave it to its own devices all winter.  As a result, I’d start out my spring gardening season with such a weedy mess that I often considered quitting the hobby.  Then there was the magic year of the goat poop.  It didn’t take me too long to notice that cleaning and mulching the bed in the fall made for an easier, much more enjoyable planting season in the spring.

Which is closely related to lesson number two: take care of your dirt, and it will take care of you.  I’m a bit ashamed I ignored this for the first 3 or 4 years of gardening.  Even that first addition of goat poop didn’t solve all my problems, but after a second year of adding compost, I have much healthier plants and much prettier, disease- and pest-free harvests.

Along with that good soil, I’ve benefitted this year from a third happy lesson: a little mulch makes a big difference.  Last fall I got very serious about saving fall leaves.  Not only did I mulch the bed for overwintering, but I also stashed away three contractor bags’ worth of crushed, sweet smelling flakes of fall to use during the growing season.  I mulched once when I prepared and planted the bed, a second time after the seedlings had emerged, and again a few weeks ago when the hot, dry weather hit and I could see patches of naked dirt peeking through.  Nature does not like bare soil, and by keeping it covered, I’ve minimized the need to water.  I’ve also had a lot fewer weeds coming up from seeds blowing around the yard.

The newest lesson, and the one I bring up in every gardening conversation this year, is that of companion planting.  I completely changed my planting design, and I like how it’s worked.  I can’t be sure if the drop in pests on my broccoli, or my great crops of carrots and onions were a direct result, but I do know that I’m making better use of my limited space.  Last year I’d guess at least a third of my garden bed went unused after I pulled my spring crops.  This year almost all the gaps I see are being slowly filled by summer plants growing in.

I’m hoping the learning curve continues in the coming months, as I’m planning on trying out a fall garden for the first time.  Now that July is here, it’s time for me to start making decisions about what, when and where I want to plant.  I was going to start with just the planter Miss Chef and I built, but after receiving 50’ of row cover material for my birthday, I might expand my plans into the main bed.  Ambitious!

In conclusion, I’d like to present this year’s garden champion:

That’s a 14 oz onion bulb (397 g for my metric-minded friends), which was donated to Friendship Gardens.  Also, there’s a cat, just for “scale.”

In spite of my best intentions, my new writing “career” and course homework have been stealing time from this blog.  On the other hand, you can see what became of that time by reading my articles here, including my first one in print, an interview with a new local baker.