A Learning Experience

I have been constantly looking at gardening blogs and videos, since I started my garden.  In this way I am getting an idea of what my garden should look like, and I am sad to say that it doesn’t look anywhere near those pictures I see.  I did get things to grow a bit, but my yield was very low.  I planted tomatoes but the plants are not very tall and bushy and there is very little fruit coming in.  I have gotten two small cucumbers and I am not sure if I am going to get any more.  The lettuce was good and I got a fair amount of radishes.  I planted carrots and they came up okay, but I didn’t plant enough.  The Bok Choy came up really well and now is going to seed.  I planted too much of that and had more than I needed.  I will do that again, but just not as much next time around.  My green peas and snow peas were a huge disappointment.  I don’t know what happened there but perhaps I didn’t water well enough.

Now that the lettuces are pretty much gone and useless (they are going to seed and I haven’t harvested in a while), it’s time to plant more.  I have to rework that bed and amend the soil putting in fresh compost and rock dust.  I am saving the most of the center bed for those and I am going to build a cold frame or put hoops up so I can harvest into the winter.  This is the first time I have ever done something like that and I am excited to give it a try.  We had such a good time eating fresh salads in the spring so it will be great to do the same during the winter months.  Now that the summer is nearing a close, I can start thinking about where I am going to grow the lettuce over the winter months.  Well actually you harvest over winter and grow in the fall.  From what I have read, the soil is still too hot to use.  Lettuce will not germinate if the soil is over 80 degrees, so I have to prepare the bed by shading it first.  So I guess my weekend chores are mapped out as I need to get the seeds in my late July I think.

This garden is a learning process.  I can’t expect everything to happen exactly as planned.  We had a terrible spring and some things didn’t work as they should have but one of the greatest parts is that nature is very forgiving and plants sometimes survive when the conditions are less than optimum conditions.  I will continue reading and trying to apply the knowledge I get and with any luck things will get better.