i have a confession. for all my good intentions my garden this year turned out pretty pitifully. i had grand visions of wading through row after row of over flowing tomoato, zuchinni, peppers, and eggplants; everything green and the vegetables luscious. it was our first year with a true vegetable garden and i think, like so many beginner's pursuits, the mind's eye and the actual reality had very little in common. rather than lush plenty, i pretty much have patchy anemic plants in dry, stale soil. sounds like eden, right?
it feels like pretty much everything that could go wrong did. the summer here in salt lake started out slowly with an unseasonably cool and rainy june so other than my spinach and lettuce crops, my early summer plantings all pretty much flunked. things were yellow and mottled and not great garden material. i seriously think i had something like 8 pea pods to show for my efforts. it was pathetic. the birds successfully stole every ripe strawberry we had. then there's flynn who at 2 years old is my garden's greatest enemy. he picked every single blossom off my cucumber plant and then ended up just having his way with it and pulling the whole thing right up out of the ground. he regularly picks all the tomatoes off the vine green or red, and he has stepped on my dear beets to the point of bruising. poor garden. i didn't pay enough attention to the tomatoes climbing up and up and nearly every plant has overrun their cage and are tipping precariously back over on to the dirt. but the biggest error of judgement was that the garden site just doesn't get enough sun. our yard has lovely huge pine and aspen trees and even though we removed a few pine behemoths last fall, we still didn't get enough golden rays to make things thrive.
i'm terming this year our guinea pig garden year, and because of our failures, i think we learned a lot. i think next summer we're ready to commit. no more pussy footing around and half heartedly growing stuff, we're going to get in it to win it! next year we will be siting things differently; pulling up grass and moving the garden to the only completely sunny patch in our yard. i will start my seeds for cold crops like lettuce, peas, spinach, and beets a lot earlier and hope that i can get a second round in again in the fall. i will water everything more and be vigilant about weekly fish emulsion fertilizer. most of all, i just want to make sure i spend the time out there taking stock and being attentive. i think truly great, productive gardens must take a lot more will power and hours than we were giving to ours.
all this being said, i am enjoying the bounty of the end of harvest season and am relishing the few garden triumphs we had. we have had many a good B.L.T. in the last couple weeks with our black master heirloom tomatoes. and i really am not lying when i say that the exactly 12 peaches that came off our little spindly peach tree were the sweetest, juiciest, and, dare i say, ambrosial peaches i've ever encountered? they were heavenly and made me seriously want to turn every inch of backyard into a peach orchard so i can share the gospel. after a rough start, the basil has finally matured and is now so prolific i've been making and freezing pesto like a fiend. i've been canning fresh salsa to make use of some respectable looking jalapeno and serrano peppers we grew.
and i know i'm not the only one with great, home grown food on my hands. i've been getting lots of nice fresh produce care packages from people...zucchini bread, potatoes, apples, beets....so much bounty. this is such a great time of year. the food couldn't be more prime and fresh or the light more golden. i feel lucky that i'm not trying to survive off what i grew this summer. we'd starve come october. but i feel even luckier still to have a little plot of earth to call my own, a place to reap what i sow. it's worth the weeds and the smack of failure. there's always next year, right?
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