Gardeners' Holidays 2022: The Changing of the Garden

I really should have posted this last weekend, but I forgot all about it in the excitement of talking about our holiday gift exchanges. So here, just a little late, is my annual post on how we did with this year's garden, and what we plan to keep or change for next year. Spoiler alert: Most of the news isn't good.

Our most productive crops this year were our lettuce and our trusty Sun Gold tomatoes. Between the spring crop of Bronze Mignonette and the summer lettuce mix, we got a total of 52 cups. Our fall planting of winter lettuce, on the other hand, didn't really give us anything before winter hit, though we might still get something off it in the spring from plants that have overwintered. (This seems to be a widespread problem, as lettuce has become ludicrously expensive at the store right now.) The Sun Golds were far and away the most productive of our tomato plants, giving us 525 tiny tomatoes from just two plants—not our best yield ever, but much better than an average year. And the Carmen peppers put in a decent showing, giving us an average-ish yield of 15 small and 6 medium peppers.

But all other crops and varieties were lackluster at best. Our new Banana pepper gave us only four fruits, and the Caballero chili pepper never produced any. Our Pineapple tomato, which produces such magnificent fruits when in good form, yielded only one small tomato, and the Premio and the new Grandma Mary's were both complete busts. The Provider green beans barely lived up to their name, yielding about a pound and a half of beans, and the Climbing French beans gave us a measly 2 ounces. We got just 8 cups of arugula, 14 ounces of snap peas, six smallish butternut squash, and a handful of cucumbers. And even though both our zucchini plants successfully fended off the borers with the help of some Bt spray, they provided only nine small, three medium, and five large squash between them.

We're assuming that that these disappointing results were mostly down to the weather conditions we had this year—a late spring, a lot of really hot days, and not much rain—rather than some sudden failure on the part of our seeds. So, for next year at least, we're planning to stick with the vegetable varieties that have performed well for us in the past. But since our former supplier, Fedco Seeds, has become increasingly unreliable, we need a new one that sells as many as possible of our trusted varieties.

To choose our new seed supplier, I started by searching for recommendations online. I found six companies with positive reviews: Botanical Interests, Harris Seeds, High Mowing Seeds, Johnny Seeds, Seed Savers, and True Leaf Market. Then I visited each of their websites looking for one that carried all the crops we wanted and all the specific varieties we were most attached to (Marketmore and Cross Country cucumbers, Provider green beans, Carmen peppers, Cascadia snap peas, and Pineapple, Premio, and Sun Gold tomatoes). Sadly, no company had all of them, but Botanical Interests and True Leaf had most of them at prices that weren't too outrageous. However, of those two, only Botanical Interests offered a printed catalog, so that's the one that ended up accompanying us on our trip out to Indiana.

From that catalog, we picked out the following varieties to try next year:

• Basil. We have a sufficient supply of sweet basil seeds that aren't too old, so for now all we need is Thai basil. There was exactly one variety of that available (Sweet Thai), so this was an easy choice.
• Leeks. Once again, Botanical Interests offered only one variety: King Richard. It's described as frost-tolerant and early-producing, with a "subtle onion flavor" and "extra-long stems." We'll see if it does better than the Lancelot variety we planted this year, which gave us six fairly scrawny leeks.
• Lettuce. This past year, we planted three kinds: Bronze Mignonette, a butterhead variety, in the spring; summer lettuce, a heat-tolerant mix; and winter lettuce, a cold-hardy variety. When I perused Botanical Interests seeking replacements for these, I discovered a single variety called Marvel of Four Seasons that might actually be able to take the place of all three. According to the catalog, it is both heat- and cold-tolerant and has a "delicate, buttery flavor." It says the harvest window is "21-55 days," which I assume means it will mature 21 days after planting and will bolt after 55 days, so to make it last through three seasons we'd need to do several plantings a few weeks apart. However, Botanical Interests also sells a heat-tolerant leaf lettuce called Salad Bowl, so we're thinking about doing a summer planting of that flanked by spring and fall plantings of the Marvel of Four Seasons. That won't put the Marvel to as thorough a test, but it will allow us to hedge our bets and give us more variety.
• Parsley. Botanical Interests has just two varieties to choose from, one flat-leaf and one curled, so we picked the flat one.
• Peppers. The one vegetable variety we particularly like that Botanical Interests doesn't have is our trusty Carmen frying pepper. However, we still have five seeds of it left from this year's packet, and Brian thinks that should be enough to get us through the next growing season. So for next year, we are going to plant those and also give this year's Banana pepper a second try. The only new variety we've picked out is a chili called Biquinho, which is described as "mild, tangy, and sweet, followed by a touch of heat." Just about my speed, in other words.
• Winter squash. For the past several years, we've planted two varieties. Waltham is fairly reliable and produces large squash, but not always very many of them, so we like to include a smaller variety like Ponca Baby or Little Dipper as a hedge. Botanical Interest doesn't offer any butternut varieties other than Waltham, but they do have a "cousin" of butternut that they call Honeynut. It's described as a compact vine that produces smaller, smoother squash with a "richer, sweeter flavor," which sounds worth a try.
  
• Zucchini. Botanical Interests doesn't sell the Green Machine variety we've grown for the past two years. They have the Black Beauty variety we've grown in the past, but we were more intrigued by a hybrid called Emerald Delight, which is described as compact and "extremely productive" with "great disease resistance." All that sounds pretty hard to argue with, so we're giving it a go.

The only other crop we need to replenish our stock of is snap peas. Botanical Interests carries the Cascadia variety that performed so well for us in 2020 (not so well last year or this year, but that was the fault of deer invaders), so we're sticking with that. We're already trying eight new vegetable varieties as it is, which is quite enough experimentation for one growing season.

There's one more type of seed I'm tempted to throw into our cart: strawberries. I've been thinking for some time about adding a strawberry bed to our yard, but I've always assumed this would require us to terrace the slope in the backyard to create a flat growing surface. Then we'd have to put in the plants, mulch them, and cover them up with netting in the summer to keep the birds from getting all our fruit. And they'd have to be either thinned to remove excess runners or chopped down entirely at the end of each season so they didn't grow into a big tangle. All in all, it seemed like a pretty big project, so I've kept putting it off.

But Botanical Interests has seeds of the Alpine or woodland strawberry, which is a rather different creature. It's not nearly as productive as a traditional strawberry, which is why the landscaper we consulted ten years ago didn't recommend them; the fruits are tiny and, according to her, difficult to harvest. But on the other hand, they're pretty easy to grow. They tolerate shade better than big strawberries, they don't require thinning, and they don't really need mulch. They don't even need a dedicated bed; you can just let them run wild as a ground cover, which is something we could use in our yard anyway. And since the similar barren strawberry is the one ground cover that has really thrived in our yard, they would probably handle the conditions pretty well.

A packet of Red and Yellow Wonder Blend, described as "wildly delicious—packed with flavor and fragrance," costs only $1.99 for 130 seeds. According to Epic Gardening, growing them from seed is "not always successful," but even if we don't end up with many plants, we haven't lost much by trying. So I'm inclined to pick up a packet, take a crack at starting them indoors, set down whatever plants we manage to grow, and see if we can get any "wildly delicious" fruit off them.

And that, in a nutshell, is our garden plan for next year. Watch this space to see how the new varieties work out and whether we end up sticking with Botanical Interests for the long haul. Happy New Year to all, and here's to good harvests in 2023!