First, let me talk a little about my gardening journey. I started off with a very small container garden on a very small covered porch. All the containers were left by a former neighbor, and I took them over and replaced all the soil with fresh soil, and for my first foray into gardening, bought a bunch of lettuce plants, and enjoyed fresh lettuce that year.
The next year, I decided to get a little more ambitious. I bought a book on container gardening, bought seeds for container-sized plants, and grew cherry tomatoes, baby peppers, cucumbers, kale, chard, lettuce, and squash. The squash failed to produce, and the lettuce wouldn't grown, but everything else seemed quite happy in my container garden.
Last year, I rented a plot in a community garden down the street. I was ready for the big leagues of gardening; growing full-sized plants and varieties that were bigger than a container garden. I planned three kinds of tomatoes, two kinds of zucchini, two kinds of cucumbers, delicata squash, three kinds of peppers, and carrots. Unfortunately, I just ended up growing the most expensive carrots I've ever eaten. The garden suffered from aphids, powdery milder, blight, blossom-end rot, and a terrible squash-bug infestation. The zucchini never produced a fruit, although the 8-ball squash gave me a few of its tiny, cute little squash. The cucumbers and delicata squash died outright. The peppers were started too late and only produced a few little peppers, and I lost my entire inital crop of tomatoes to blight and blossom end rot. I ended up with a secondary crop of roma tomatoes that were quite lovely, but that and the carrots were about it.
I was a little sad about my failure, but I wasn't ready to give up. As my husband and I like to say, despite all the failure, I learned a lot, making it a "+1" to gardening. So, I decided to investigate companion crops, and really research which crops grow well together, and which do not. I also decided to mostly abandon the idea of squash, since the infestation of bugs is pretty terrible.
So what does my garden look like this year? Here's the plan:
In case you can't read that, I am planning:
Roma tomatoes
Silvery Fir Tree tomatoes
Green Arrow peas
Sugar Snap peas
Green beans
Black beans
Carrots
Parsnips
Radishes
Cucumber
Broccoli
Healthy Sweet peppers
Italian Gold peppers
Mini bell peppers
Gold Nugget cherry tomatoes
Zucchini
Eggplant
Around these, I would like to plant some companion plants and herbs, including:
Sage
Oregano
Borage
Basil
Rosemary
Thyme
Chamomile
Chives
Marigold
It's pretty ambitious, I'll admit. But--that's not all!
Our condo has a back deck, and I, of course, have claimed some space out there as well. I placed a window box on an open landing where it would get a ton of sun, and planted some very successful lettuce there last spring. It's a little too sunny for lettuce the rest of the summer, and succession plantings last year failed to take. This year, I'll plant an inital crop of greens in the window box, then, three weeks later, sow some more seed on our shady little railing in a round, shallow salad bowl, in hopes it will do better in the shade. I'll then transplant some lavender, rosemary, thyme, chamomile, and maybe a cherry tomato or 8-ball squash into the sunny area.
I planted some alpine strawberries last year that actually grew from seed (after three years of trying!) I'm not entirely sure they survived this harsh winter, but one can always hope. I also have a three-year-old blueberry bush that has yet to produce fruit. I'm going to start dumping coffee grounds on the soil to help it out a little, and see what it does this year.
So, that's the plan for Kilgore's 2014 Garden. I'll be sure to post updates and things start growing.
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