Gardeners' Holidays 2021: The Changing of the Garden

After one year of celebrating the holidays exclusively over Zoom, Brian and I have resumed our annual visits to his folks in Indiana for Christmas. And as usual, we spent part of the 12-hour trip going over the Fedco seed catalog, deciding which of the crops in our garden to keep and which to replace. But this year, that discussion didn't take all that long, because most of the crops we planted in this year's garden performed reasonably well. 

That's not to say we got a good harvest of everything we planted. But most of the crops that failed did so through no fault of their own, like the pea and bean plants that were all eaten by that pesky deer before we got a chance to harvest anything off them. The seeds can't be blamed for that, so we're going to keep buying the same varieties next year (Cascadia snap peas and Provider and Climbing French green beans) while doing our best to shore up our anti-deer defenses. (I checked to see if Fedco offered any products that could help with that, but alas, it does not.)

The only crop we tried this year on which the actual seeds let us down was our new Apple peppers. Or perhaps I should say our complete lack of new Apple peppers, since not a single one of the seeds Brian started actually germinated. So we ended up planting three of our trusty Carmen pepper plants instead, along with one Caballero pepper to provide a bit of heat. And while they all performed fine, they didn't provide that much variety.

The sad irony here is that we didn't really want the Apple pepper in the first place. We only bought it at all because our first choice, an early producer called Banana, was sold out. So this year we're going to try again to buy the Banana pepper seeds, and in case those are sold out again, we've selected a later-producing but apparently quite tasty pepper called Aconcagua as a backup.

The one other new variety we're planning to try next year is another paste tomato called Grandma Mary's. The Opalka variety we grew this year did okay, but it suffered a bit from blossom end rot. The Grandma Mary's also has the advantage of being an early producer, so we'll have more opportunities to harvest them.

We're also planning a few other changes in the garden layout. We're thinking about dropping the Vanilla marigolds, which we originally got because they're supposed to help deter pests around the tomatoes. But we can't actually tell if they're doing any good in that regard, and they haven't proved to be very useful as cutting flowers. If you try to cut off just one bloom, it's too short to stick in a vase, and if you cut off a whole step, you get a lot of unformed buds and dead blossoms along with the few full-blown ones. Also, they're one of the most expensive seed varieties we buy. So if our supply of these seeds is depleted, we probably won't bother to replenish it. Instead, we'll use their square to plant some extra parsley.

We're also thinking about doing the same with the square where we used to plant dill. It never seemed to grow where we actually planted it, though we often got little volunteer plants all over the garden beds where we hadn't put in any seeds. And even these volunteers didn't produce much dill at the time when we needed it most, which is while the cucumbers were producing and we wanted fresh dill for pickles. We managed to put up just one or two jars of dill pickles before the dill all bolted and we ended up doing plain garlic or mustard pickles for the rest of the season. So in 2022, we think we might try planting some dill out in the herb bed in the front yard instead. Perhaps it will grow better there, and if it doesn't, we're not really any worse off than we were before.

One final change we're contemplating is to stop using our "carpet seeding" method when planting arugula. We originally started doing this because the thickly planted seedlings crowded out most of the weeds, and it's worked fine with the basil and even the lettuces, which we can gradually thin out as they come in. But with the arugula, the individual seedlings are too tiny to pick right away, and by the time they get big enough to have any good eating on them, they don't get in much growth before they bolt. So Brian thinks we might actually get a better crop by planting fewer seeds and giving them a little more space to grow.

There's one new technique we tried this year that we'll definitely be keeping: spraying the zucchini plants with Bt to deter squash vine borers. This worked where all our previous methods - yellow cup decoys to lure away the parent bugs, wrapping the stems in tin foil, covering them with dirt - have failed. Our two new Green Machine zucchini plants produced a steady stream of zucchini all through the growing season this year, ranging in size from medium to huge. And the huge ones hadn't simply escaped our attention before they could grow to that size; they actually seemed to get that big overnight, going from tiny to whopping while we slept. So we'll absolutely be sticking with this variety, and this method of growing it, in 2022.

One crop I can't report on the success or failure of is the one pot of potatoes Brian planted this spring. They were kind of an afterthought, as we never managed to get out to the Belle Mead Co-Op for seed potatoes, so he just bought a little bag of fingerling potatoes at Trader Joe's, planted a couple in a pot, and ate the rest. And since the frost set in, he still hasn't gotten around to digging them up and seeing if we actually managed to get anything off them. Given the disappointing performance of the previous year's crop, I'm not expecting much, but even if we get no potatoes at all, at least we didn't spend much on them. And if we actually do get more off them than we put in, we'll know that we can pick up seed potatoes the same way next year, rather than making a special trip to buy them.

And that's about all there is to say about our 2021 garden. We're hoping 2022 will bring us fewer deer, more beans and peas, more honeyberries, and an equally good crop of raspberries. And while we wouldn't complain about having not quite as many plums next year, we're hoping to still get enough to try experimenting with some plum wine. At this point, we've already given (or are about to give) plum jam to everyone on our holiday gift list, so we'd like to have something new to offer them next year.