Vegetable Learning Experiences

I originally thought about calling this “Planning A Beautiful Vegetable Garden” in keeping with, y’know, the theme of the site and all. Then I said “Let’s not kid ourselves.” Then I laughed. Then I poured several fingers of whiskey into my coffee and cried for a bit. Such is my relationship with vegetable gardening.

I think I ate one of these. The others went from unripe to rotten without passing any of the stages in between.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds is my go-to spot for seed-kind. They come up with all kinds of fascinating seeds in all the moral and ethical ways and I read the little descriptions and go “Wow, that sounds cool!’ and then I order things that claim to do well in the Southeast. Then everything but the cucumbers die through total neglect, and I go buy transplants, and the cycle of gardening is again complete. (Cue swelling music, lion cubs held aloft over the savannah, etc.)

I have never quite gotten the hang of vegetables. Granted, I’ve only really been trying for about three, four years, so I don’t feel bad. If I’m still doing this in a decade, we’ll have words.

I blame my native plant addiction. I started with natives long before I tried vegetables. You plant a native plant, you water it thoroughly, you maybe remember to water it two or three times in the next couple weeks, and assuming it doesn’t die instantly and you didn’t site it totally wrong, that sucker digs its little roots in like grim death and says “I don’t know where I am or how I got here, but by god, I’m going to grow!”

You try this with a vegetable and all you get is painful memories and a nice receipt from the nursery suitable for framing. Vegetables are divas.

I am, admittedly, somewhat hampered by circumstance. Hard clay, high humidity, extreme heat…the Southeast has it all. Plants rot in the ground in winter and spring, and any who survive are immediately crushed by summer. This is not conducive to vegetable gardening. You have to actually keep track of seasons and frost dates and things.

So I do the trowel-and-error method. Every year, come fall, I order a couple of seed packets, and then I do everything wrong with them. Anything that manages to survive and produce actual food is a winner and I will grow it again.

This year, I learned that tiny Parisian pickling cucumbers are ideal for our somewhat lackadaisical pickling, and that I am growing peas entirely so that I can grab one or two a day and eat them. (Full-scale pea production requires things like “hundred-foot rows.” It is to laugh. I have fifteen feet. You will take your fifteen feet and like it, peas!)  This is not going to cut down on world hunger, but eating a few raw peas in the morning make me feel, briefly, like a gardener who knows what they are doing. As I need as much positive reinforcement as I can get on that front, I keep planting them. They do well for about two months and then get powdery mildew and die. As they are not exploding or catching fire, I consider this a triumph.

I also learned yet another of the ways not to grow onions. I am a master at not growing an onion. You want an onion to sit in the ground and do nothing whatsoever, I am your woman.

We will not speak of the asparagus. I started them from seedlings, I hardened them off, I planted them outside. They sulked in the ground for three weeks and then vanished in the way that only angry seedlings can. This concluded my experiments with non-direct seeding.

I didn’t even try with asparagus. I love asparagus, but once I’d read the cultivation requirements, I gave it up. That’s not going to happen. The only way I could prep a full-sun hundred-foot bed with aged cow-manure and cultivation to a depth of eighteen inches is if I piled eighteen inches worth of cow manure on the driveway, and my boyfriend would have quite a lot to say about the matter.

The only thing I can grow reliably is tomatoes. There is a certain irony in this, because tomatoes are supposed to be one of the finicky plants and you hear tales of plagues, blights, wilts, rains of blood and all manner of miseries, but I can grow them just fine. I have a simple method whereby I buy a tomato plant, stick it in the ground two weeks before any sane person would stick a tomato in the ground, and then when I hear there’s a frost, I put a plastic wastebasket over it at night. (This is early in the spring, when I am still willing to micro-manage vegetables.) Some months later, there are tomatoes. A LOT of tomatoes. Then my boyfriend and I agree that this year we really need to learn to make our own tomato sauce. Then we don’t, and I throw a lot of rotten tomatoes over the back fence into the woods. (If the trees are ever cut down back there, we may get a sudden crop of feral Pink Brandywines. They should last about a month before the Japanese honeysuckle eats them.) Then August hits, and the plant goes into a decline and nothing ripens for two months, and by the time I start thinking how much I’d like a tomato sandwich again, all the green tomatoes have rotted without ever coming ripe.

I am also very very good at jalapenos and cayenne. I can grow peppers in a pot like you wouldn’t believe. They come up savage and malicious and water-deprived and the end result is a pepper that will stomp on your tongue and make you beg for mercy. After two years of this, my boyfriend had to go to the doctor for some horrible ulcerating intestinal thing and that was the end of spicy food in our house. (He’s fine now. Yes, I still feel a little guilty. If only the internal bleeding hadn’t happened the day after he ate all those roasted jalapenos…)

So, it’s fall. Time to buy seeds for the next round of Vegetable Learning Experiences. This year I’m trying a climbing spinach, “Bull’s Blood” beets, and daikon radishes, which were recommended to me as a clay-buster by a friend who can actually, y’know, grow veggies. (Plant daikon. Harvest daikon. Fill hole left by daikon with cow manure. Repeat as needed. This sounds simple enough. I might be able to do it.)

We’ll know in spring. Wish me luck.

© 2011, Ursula Vernon. All rights reserved. This article is the property of BeautifulWildlifeGarden.com If you are reading this at another site, please report that to us