It appears that I’ve caught the gardening bug.
It all started this past winter. We had a significant hard freeze here and lost a lot of our plants. That gave us a lot of open space to fill. I decided if we’re growing things, we might as well get something from what we are growing. Most non-tree food plants are annuals anyway, so we’d expect everything to die in the next freeze and be able to bring the garden back in the spring with just a few seeds.
For the first planting at the end of February we tried: strawberries, bell pepper, cantaloupe, plum, navel orange, a spicy salad mix, blackberry, corn, rosemary, tomatoes, basil, oregano and cilantro. The blackberry was one of those stems you can buy in the paper pot you’re supposed to bury. It did nothing. I then tried a concord grape in that spot of the same buried pot and stick type with more failure. Currently, there are a few tiny watermelon plants growing there.
The first main failure was the result of using some bad fertilizer. The package said “Citrus, Fruit and Pecan”, but it killed most of the strawberries, the front cantaloupe, and the plum tree.
In a second planting I added or replaced: cucumber and cantaloupe. The cucumber has been producing like crazy. It’s too bad my wife doesn’t like cucumber. The tomato produced for a while, but now that it’s blazing hot, it’s barely surviving. The herbs are thriving. I had some success with the corn. I tried planting it progressively trying for a constant harvest. That worked ok for the first four ears of corn, but with so few plants I had to stay on top of the hand pollination, which really isn’t all that easy. The soil was also quickly spent (successive stalks grew shorter and shorter) and the corn tasted terrible. I’ve since learned the flavor would have been greatly improved if we had eaten the corn right away. Some varieties of sweet corn will convert their sugars to starch after picking. The corn was very sweet immediately after picking, but waxy when I finally cooked it.
I have since pulled the remaining corn, added compost and planted amaranth. It’s a little late in the season for amaranth to fully develop, so we’ll see if we get anything from it.