Gardeners' Holidays 2020: The Changing of the Garden

This was a weird year for — well, everything, but particularly for our garden, one of the few things that shouldn't have been affected by the pandemic. As I noted on the last gardeners' holiday, it was a fabulous year for raspberries, and not too bad for peppers, winter squash, and tomatoes. (In fact, our tally of those has increased as we successfully ripened some indoors.) But other crops that have flourished in our garden in years past — basil, green beans, snap peas, lettuce — had disappointing yields, and a few were absolutely terrible. Through the whole season, we got only 6 ounces of arugula, one solitary zucchini, and not a single cherry or plum. And it's not even altogether clear what was to blame: the weather? The squirrels, who are reproducing faster with fewer cars on the road to prey on them? Does that mean the pandemic was indirectly responsible after all?

We can't say, but one thing we feel pretty confident is not at fault is the seeds we planted. Most of them were varieties we'd used before with reasonable success, and we have enough faith in them to stick with them for another year. There were a few new varieties that we tried this year, such as the Lancelot leeks and Opalka tomatoes, that weren't great performers, but given what a disappointing this year was for the garden generally, we feel they deserve another chance. Besides, it's not like we had any better candidates to replace them, since the Lincoln leeks we've grown in the past were equally feeble, and no paste tomato variety we've tried has exactly been an impressive producer. (Also, Brian was impressed with how firm-fleshed the Opalkas were, producing almost no juice when used in Pasta a la Caprese.) So we'll give them both one more try and hope that next year they get a better chance to show what they can do.

So, in the end, there was only one veggie variety in our 2020 garden we decided not to keep in 2021: the new Takara Shishito peppers. These were certainly productive, giving us a total of 26 fully ripe peppers and 16 green ones from just two plants, but there were a couple of problems with them. First, the individual peppers were quite small, and it's a lot more work to get the same volume of edible material from four little peppers than from two medium ones or one really big one. But an even bigger problem was their flavor. The Fedco catalog says of these, "Most will be mild — the occasional green pepper, around 10%, will be hot," but that was not our experience at all. Pretty much all of them were hot, making them only suitable for use in hot dishes. In fact, they were probably slightly hotter than the Caballero poblano chili peppers we also tried this year, edging close to jalapeno heat levels. Since they had limited utility, the bulk of the Takara Shishito peppers we harvested ended up going into the freezer, and we estimate that this preserved harvest should be enough to last us another two years. In short, there's clearly no good reason to grow more of them next year.

Thus, when we cracked open the Fedco catalog this year, we went straight to the pepper section to look for a replacement. We skipped over the entire page devoted to bell peppers, since (a) we've never had the slightest success with them in the past, and (b) they're a bigger risk than smaller frying peppers, since each plant produces fewer fruits. If a single fruit is damaged by disease, or insects, or whatever, you've just lost maybe 20 percent of your crop. We also skipped the tiny cheese and pimiento peppers, which are a bit too small to be terribly useful, and also not our favorites in terms of flavor.

So we went straight for the "Elongated picklers, fryers & roasters," and there we found two that looked particularly promising. Both of them, coincidentally, are named after fruits, which we took as a good sign, based on how much we like our Pineapple tomatoes. The first, Banana, takes 65 days to produce "yellow pointed 6" fruits that look hot but are not, turning orange and ripening red"; the second, Apple, takes 80 days to produce "shiny 4" fruits that are elongated...Irresistibly appealing even before the ripe fruity sweetness touches your tongue." While the Apple's boasts of "dependable and problem free" plants and award-winning flavor were tempting, we ultimately decided the Banana looked like a better bet simply because it takes less time to mature. Part of the problem with this year's garden, we suspected, was that everything took so long to ripen, and we had quite a lot of unripe fruit left on the vines at the end of the season. So we're hoping that by choosing a faster-growing pepper, we'll get to harvest more of them over the course of the summer.

Aside from that one new crop, we're planning to try a few other interventions in next year's garden to see if we can improve on this year's rather feeble harvest:

• Reducing the number of Marketmore cucumber vines, which all died this year, and increasing the number of the hardier but less productive Cross-Country vines
• Investing in some Bt spray to protect the zucchini from squash vine borers
  
• Taking more aggressive action to protect the plum trees, including heavy pruning, regular spraying, deterring squirrels with Tree Tanglefoot on paper collars, and picking the fruit at first blush to ripen indoors. (We might be missing out on tree-ripened flavor, but that's better than never getting to taste the plums at all.)

But all that work is to come. All we have to do right now is order the seeds and supplies, then curl up under our blankets and wait for spring to come — while the garden itself, under its heavy blanket of snow, does the same. Here's to a better year in 2021, in the garden and everywhere else.