How does your garden grow?

We started our backyard gardening with one raised bed a few years ago, and last year we added a second. My general approach to gardening is beneficent neglect. I prune and water and weed when I wander past, but I don’t do much other than that. You might expect that to be a formula for pretty pathetic yields, but it works surprisingly well for us.

That said, the garden was looking pretty puny when we left for a weeklong vacation at the end of June. Our housesitters were going to water it daily, but I wasn’t expecting much from it. Then we got home and it was all green and thriving, and it was because the housesitters had installed an irrigation system in our absense. I highly recommend inviting a professional landscape designer to vacation at your house while you’re out of town.

The irrigation system kept the garden alive during our long, hot, dry July. Our region has resumed its deciduous rainforest climate over the last few weeks, and I’m beginning to worry that the plants are going to take over the entire yard.

In the Garden

lettuce gone to seed
Our volunteer lettuce, gone to seed.

We didn’t plant lettuce this year, but a volunteer plant from last year popped up anyway. It went to seed, and I decided to see just how large it would get. The answer so far is: very, very large. It has its own quadrant of the garden bed.

tomatoes
We are once more overrun with tomatoes.

I hadn’t planned to plant as many tomatoes as we have in past years, because none of us likes tomatoes. So naturally our tomato plants are always prolific producers. Our neighbor Farmer Ted was giving away tons and tons of tomato starters, though, so we took six of them. They did nothing at all for weeks and weeks, and then suddenly they were ginormous. I’ve had to prune a couple of them because they keep escaping their cages and flopping over onto the pepper plants. Speaking of which: I am in love with the tiny bell peppers we’ve been growing, Pete and I canned some delicious spicy banana peppers, and something keeps eating our jalapeños before they have a chance to grow.

squash
Zucchini leaves blocking out the sun.

I tried to grow yellow squash in a bucket last year, and it didn’t work at all. This year we put the squash in the garden bed instead, and they were doing great until they started getting hit by pickle worms. I think the eggplant might be suffering from being so close to the zucchini, though. The leaves are blocking a lot of sunlight. We’ll space things out a little more next year.

cucumbers
Poor cucumber plant.

The cucumber is in the same bed as the squash. Apparently cucumbers grow ninja-style, because some days I go out there and find a full-size cuke where there was only a blossom a day earlier. The cucumbers were doing wonderfully until the pickle worm found them. Now about 50 percent of them have holes in them. At least we got to make a few pickles before the plant was attacked.

Lessons Learned

  • The raised beds are too close together. It’s not a problem when the plants are small, but right now it’s tough to get between them to pick anything because I keep getting grabbed by cucumber vines or stepping on a squash leaf. I’m not sure we’ll be able to move the ones that we’ve already built, but if and when we add another it’ll be a little farther away.
  • I miss having a field of lettuce. We’ll definitely plant some next year.
  • The squash and zucchini need their own space.
  • We really, really don’t need six tomato plants.
  • One thought on “How does your garden grow?”

    1. Put in a trellis for your cukes. They will climb up the trellis and off the ground. Maybe it will keep the pickle worms off too.

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