So, Dave and I finally got the garden in this year. It's been such a blessing having the garden right behind the house. Four 4x8-foot boxes and two little corner boxes and we've managed to grow some seriously bountiful harvests. Of course, we always have our potted plants on the porch. But only 17 this year. I believe we had as many as 30 one year.
Dave gets to pick the potted ones every year (ones we're not getting a dozen of). This year, we have hot peppers— three medium hot block, three Hungarian wax (basically the same thing) and three jalapeno (hot again). Then there are four black cherry tomatoes (OK?) and four Cherokee Purple tomatoes (my interest is piqued).
Only six sweet orange cherry tomatoes this year. I'm still not over the year we accidentally planted two dozen cherry tomato plants. We were picking about 150 tomatoes every other day, and our dog Duke would only eat the split ones. And speaking of Dukie, I'm glad he's not here to see a garden without broccoli. When we had the big garden out back, he would walk through and pick his own veggies, a pepper here and there, but always lots of broccoli. He loved it.
I'm done with it. Regular old broccoli worms are one thing. Put the broccoli in salt water and they pop right off. We used to feed them to our iguana Jeffro. Then it was slugs. We spent a couple of years baiting them with beer traps. Who knew slugs were such beer hounds. Next it was those striped caterpillar-type worms. They would just decimate a plant's leaves. Last year, they even went after the broccoli heads themselves. They oozed some icky slime and just ruined it. I'm done growing it for a while. We'll buy it. Why not? We buy cauliflower all the time because we never have been able to successfully grow it in all our 35-plus years of gardening.
We rotated the crops again this year. I always thought that was just for farmers and their big fields, but no, it's a real thing for little gardens like ours, too. Before, we put the same things in the same boxes and it was like every year they did worse. But switch it up and put this here and that there and watch the difference in the harvest.
The peppers didn't do too well over by the pine trees last year, so we'll see how the tomatoes fare there. And we're experimenting with a frame from a patio umbrella, cut a little shorter, as a kind of tomato cage. Something for them to climb on.
The cucumbers went where the beans were last year — new thing — they're the pickling kind. This year, Dave and I get to learn how to make pickles. Sure wish we had Grandma Marion's and Grandpa Ernie's recipe for butter pickles. They were the very best.
The orange cherries are in the corners and the bell peppers are where the cukes outdid themselves last year. Nearly every one we picked was a foot long and there were tons of them. I hope the peppers do the same.
I had everything in but the beans when I remembered a very crucial part of our garden - the black stuff - the black landscaping canvas. You roll it out, cut it to size and tack it down. Cut an X, dig a little hole and plop in a plant. No weeding the rest of the summer. But I forgot it and put in our plants.
Dave said never mind, just do without it this year. Uh, hello? No way. I'm not spending my summer weeding the garden. It was a nightmare, but I managed to get the black stuff down in every box. It's not pretty, but it is functional. I will not be weeding and I am looking forward to a great harvest.