Vegetable gardening successes and failures

Every year is different. Some vegetables (and varieties) do well some years, and others are challenged.

I've had lots of tomatoes this year, thanks to abundant spring rains, but largely of a few varieties. Thank goodness for sturdy hybrids that happily produce faced with the usual tomato diseases.

My second round of plantings (from tip cuttings) are doing well, too, along with heirloom tomato plants growing in pots (in nice disease-free soil, of course). The second round of squash is flourishing, too, although between squash vine borers and woodchuck herbivory, the early plantings are just about gone.

I've left the winter squash and tromboncino squash growing in the satellite garden (maybe they'll outgrow the woodchucks?). The tomatoes look good, maybe the eggplants will produce some non-bitter fruits (some of them have been truly nasty), and maybe the yard-long beans will shake off the aphids, which have been a major garden pest this year.

Growing your own vegetables

Happily, what I do at work and my home gardening and nature observation efforts overlap quite a bit.

Last Saturday's event at the Garden (Garden Fest) promoting growing your own vegetables and building community was a wonderful gathering centered on one of my favorite gardening passions.

All of the folks that we brought together as volunteer staff helped create a wonderful synergy of enthusiasm, combined with an unexpectedly large turnout.

Here's a link to my post on our unofficial 'What's Happening at the Garden' blog.

Starting a vegetable garden

Ed, from Slow Cook, asked bloggers to post about starting a vegetable garden recently, in a post forwarded to me by a gardening friend (CEN).

This is a topic I'm totally keen on. At the Garden where I work, we're having an event next weekend to promote vegetable gardening, with the tagline of 'Building Community, Growing Vegetables.' Those of us who enjoy growing vegetables know the joy of harvesting and eating from the garden, whether it's a couple of tomato plants or a series of raised beds or an expansive 'kitchen garden' -- and we're keen on promoting it to others.

The first season in my 'main' vegetable garden

My first vegetable garden as an 'adult' was modest. We'd just put in a fence (for our old boy, our dog Chessie), who wasn't prone to roam, anyway, but we sprung for picket fence in the most visible areas.

I planted snow peas -- and this was just the beginning.

My previous forays involved trying to plant onions in the caliche soil of the Texas Hill Country as a teenager, taking on WAY too much space as a young researcher in a field station community garden (and being overwhelmed by weeds), and planting apple, peach, and nectarine trees in a shady Southeast Georgia backyard (I harvested some tasty Golden Delicious apples in the last summer we spent there).

But, our soil here is clayey, but our older house has many years' worth of thatch-rich soil below the scruffy lawn, so it's not too bad, with continuous amending.

I started small and used Square-Foot gardening and intensive gardening methods as my inspiration. Some years later, I'm talking about vegetable gardening to groups.

So, what's my advice about starting a vegetable garden?

First: Start small.

Second: Make it close to the house.

Third: Place your beds close to a water source (within reasonable hose length).

Fourth: Grow what you (and your family) like to eat (and don't plant too much).

Fifth: Garden through the year (as much as you can). Spring, summer, fall (and winter) work for us in the SE US.

Sixth: Remember vegetables are pampered annuals (nutrient and water hogs) and need both rich soil with added (preferably) organic fertilizer and water to be optimally productive.

Seventh: Harvest frequently (daily in prime season for beans, tomatoes, etc.).

Eighth: Keep it fun!

Here are a few kitchen gardening tips from a short video clip (where I somehow was the featured weekly blogger on a local TV station recently).

Gardening and cooking

Rainbow carrots from my garden

I was struck by a comment CEN made in response to a recent post: Growing Vegetables.

Among other interesting points, she wrote:
'It's hard to work up much of an interest in vegetable gardening if people don't cook or enjoy a variety of foods or have a curiosity about them-- economic reasons or no. If all people know is to microwave packaged stuff, what's the point of growing vegetables?'

Hmm, of course, she's right. But how could you resist these rainbow carrots?

Why spend any time growing vegetables unless you enjoy eating them, first and foremost?

Sharing and preserving the harvest, as well as the pleasure in gardening itself -- those things are nice, but vegetables and fruits almost nudge you towards harvesting them, no matter how much you might be enjoying their appearance.

Thomas Jefferson reportedly took great pleasure in his vegetable garden from an eater's perspective, focusing on vegetables as the primary part of his diet and waiting for the early peas, growing sesame for oil for his salads, planting fruit trees, etc. (My Esopus Spitzenburg apple sapling from Monticello's Center for Historic Plants is now planted in a sunny spot in the NC mountains, BTW).

A basic vegetable gardening 'rule' is: grow what you and your family like to eat.

I was a cook before I was a gardener, although I have fond childhood memories of picking wild blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and salmon berries. As a grad student in California, the abundance and diversity of produce available in local produce markets (eg. the Monterey Market) was eye-opening -- fresh mushrooms were a revelation to me at the time (late 70's, early 80's). Another revelation were the wonderful Hunan and Szechuan dishes produced by local restaurants.

My parents were neither cooks or gardeners, although they certainly were interested in fitness and health.

But I remember buying a book in those graduate school years about 'Growing Vegetables the Chinese Way' which showed beautiful raised beds of attractive well-maintained vegetables, similar to the one we saw many years later near Hoi An, Vietnam. This gardener was pleased to show us the results of his effort.


And I also bought a book by Rosalind Creasey, called 'Cooking from the Garden' -- a fabulous book describing different sorts of food gardens and the kind of vegetables that were grown in each. I still have both books. Creasey's books were instrumental in launching an edible gardening trend (micro as it may have been). And there are many more since then.

I read a recent piece in Eating Well by Ellen Ecker Ogden about how she founded Cook's Garden Seeds some years ago (which she sold recently to Ball Seed Company), and how she started providing recipes to encourage customers to try something new.

And a comment by a keen vegetable gardener who isn't the primary cook in his family has got me thinking about this, too. He said he'd like to learn to be a better cook so he could use more of what he grew.

There's a total connection between what I cook for dinner and what's in the garden in the primary growing season. Fresh brussel sprouts were the vegetable for today (thanks to Kathy and the walled veggie garden next to the visitor center). Fabulous.

Growing vegetables

I had an interesting conversation today with a very experienced vegetable gardener. She grew up in a rural community in NC where seeds were saved and shared, vegetable gardening was a regular activity, and putting up vegetables was part of summer life. Her journeys have taken her to European cities (where she saw lots of vegetable gardening first-hand), to Detroit, where she helped organize a community garden, and now to Clemson as part of the Sustainable Ag Initiative and the Student Organic Farm. We share a love of vegetable gardening, clearly.

She was surprised to hear that SC Master Gardeners are now becoming enthusiastic about the idea of growing vegetables (when I started at the Garden 15 years ago, there were maybe 5 MG's in our local group of 60+ that I knew who grew vegetables). She thought that that was the point of the MG program (I wish!)

I've done several programs over the last year to different MG organizations in SC with a 'Creative Vegetable Gardening' theme. It's been definitely a 'new' interest. But I'm thinking this is only the beginning. I sent off a revised piece about vegetable gardening today for the SC Nursery and Landscape Association's publication -- the editor replied it was a 'hot topic'-- hooray!

I'm planning to be more focused on producing and storing vegetables for later use (I'm totally inspired by fellow gardening bloggers like Rob and Kathy), rather than just current consumption. It's sounding like fun at the moment, as well as tasty and nutritious.

Organizing the programmatic part of our Garden Fest in April this year, for the first time, I'm feeling a strong sense of community and interest in vegetable gardening, which is most welcome.

I didn't grow up in a family of gardeners, by any means, being a city kid, but my maternal grandmother was an excellent and keen gardener (by early necessity), and I was entranced by her berry patches, stores of home-canned beans and tomatoes, and preserves. And one set of my paternal grandparents were farmers, too, and a visit to their farm was a wonderful experience when I was maybe 8 years old.