Dave and I have been together for more than 40 years now and have had a vegetable garden for almost all of those years. Now that we're in our 60s, (holy moly, is that a thing?), the big 30x40 garden at the way-back of the property was too much. Our son built us beautiful 4x8 garden boxes right behind the house.
Dave and I supplemented our little garden spot by putting in fake grass carpet over the pea gravel that was constantly riddled with weeds. That looked awful. Now it's pretty and green. Of course, we bought the carpet in small batches for peanuts at yard sales. We also added a little portable fire pit. Dave had been wanting one for a few years now. A local store had them for about a hundred dollars. A decent enough price but I wasn't ready to pull the trigger. Good thing, too, because we found one in good condition for five bucks at a yard sale. Cool, we both win.
Of course, it would have melted our beautiful green carpet. It cost $52 for brick pavers to set our $5 fire box on. And we can't have too big of a fire because the plants in the garden boxes don't seem to care for it. It's like I could literally hear them screaming from the smoke. OK, we keep it small and make sure it's continuous flamage. No smoke.
We planted a little early this year, about mid-May, and all the plants seem to be thriving. Since we learned to rotate our crops, we've been having banner years. I made a list of just what we planted in each garden box back to the beginning in 2021. Easy to do since I take photos of the garden probably weekly every year. It's kind of to convince myself they are growing. They were this little, now they're this big, and now look what we've picked.
So what I learned from my annual pix is that for the first four years, we had things in the same boxes. Cukes did good here last year, do it again. Nope, bad idea. Different plants take different nutrients from the soil. We add some liquid fertilizer about every three weeks and a little potash. I thought it was pronounced Po-tash and was some kind of obscure vitamin for plants. Turns out it's pot-ash and I can scoop some out of Dave's little fire box. A good friend pointed that out to me and then laughed and laughed.
The beans are the first to produce this year. Shocker. Beans are the easiest thing in the world to grow. Now I know why we grew bean plants in third grade in 1973. Put a bean seed in a Styrofoam cup of dirt and in a week, you've got a bean plant. I put in seven rows of roughly 15-20 seeds per and we're picking every other day now. I cooked up 3 pounds of beans with my restaurant copycat recipe and it's time to pick again.
We stocked up on pint jars from yard sales so far this summer in anticipation of a bumper crop of tomatoes. We have a dozen SuperBush tomato plants, along with four Cherokee Purple, which supposedly grow tomatoes that weigh 1/2 to 3/4 of a pound each and have a purplish color inside and out. Bring it on.
We had such a plentiful batch of cucumbers last year that I thought we should learn how to make pickles this year. We bought pickling cucumber plants, but they didn't seem to do well at first. We lost three of the nine right off the bat. So, we bought nine more plants, but they're not specifically "picklers." If we pick them young enough, though, they're supposed to be OK. Time will tell on that. Now, if I could just get the chipmunks to let things ripen before they pick.