I know, I know, I do this every year, but I've discovered that my readers love to hear about my failures. It's comforting to find there are fellow gardeners suffering similar troubles. For me, it's also a helpful reminder of what I did wrong or right each summer. Since my memory is obviously as good as a rheostat and is always dim when it comes to remembering which seeds I've planted in previous years, it's nice to have a record.
Let's start with flowers this year instead of vegetables. I bought some white petunias this spring that turned out to be the cascading kind designed to be planted in hanging baskets. It was a mistake that turned into a delight. By July they were making an incredible display. They climbed up and over and around the perennials, making a blaze of white blossoms long after their hosts had finished blooming. I never bothered to pinch off their spent blooms, but even though they produced seeds, it didn't deter the plants from continuing to put forth an endless supply of new flowers. I wish I'd taken a picture before the frost - would have been much nicer than the Brussels sprouts.
My friend Eileen gave me a flat of beautiful marigolds of the palest yellow. I've always made a border of marigolds along the vegetable garden fence. This discourages insects that dislike the strong smell of these flowers. Since I'm not very fond of the color orange I was thrilled to find these new marigolds. They are still full of powder puffs of creamy bloom. I potted up several plants just before the frost to bring inside. Don't know how long they'll continue blooming, but I thought it was worth a try.
The vegetable garden was, as usual, full of ups and downs. The biggest success was the cucumbers. I planted a long-vined variety called Summer Dance from Pinetree Seeds, a Japanese type as crisp as an apple. I've had a cucumber sandwich on nice thin bread for lunch just about every day since late August, trying to keep up with them.
I chose a new variety of bush bean this summer called Masai. The plants are small but produced dozens of long thin beans and kept producing them all summer. The beans never got too fat, even when fully mature, and I could pick whole handfuls at a time. The plants stayed upright so the beans weren't dragged down in the dirt and hardly needed to be washed.
The colorful collection of peppers - red, green, yellow, purple and brown - that I raised from seed (also from Pinetree Seeds) were not a success. Of course there was no way to tell which seedlings would produce which colors. I had way too many seedlings and by not planting all of them, I ended up with all green and one yellow, so I can't tell you what those other varieties would have tasted like.
I'd forgotten the effort involved in raising your own seedlings. The zinnias I started from seed to transplant to the vegetable garden for bouquets. I also grew California poppies from seed and they were an equally big disappointment. I thought they'd be like the ones I saw growing in a garden in England which were a spectacular rainbow of pastel colors, but they were all plain yellow and too small to be worth picking.
I started my seedling too early because I was going to New Orleans and wanted to get a head start. Most got too leggy and tall by the time I transplanted them. Starting the Brussels sprouts that early was a serious mistake. Like parsnips, Brussels sprouts require several hard frosts in order to taste good.
My plants were almost four feet tall before there was any cold weather and the sprouts at the bottoms of their stems were bigger than golf balls. We harvested a batch after the first frost, picking the small ones higher up each stalk, but they weren't very good. The next batch was better, but I think we need a few really good killing frosts before we try any more.
How were your carrots this year? I had the biggest carrots I've ever grown. By August they were almost as big as cucumbers, but surprisingly sweet and tender. With a half bushel of new potatoes, the carrots and a row's worth of onions, I decided it was time to have a pot roast and invite a few friends for dinner. A good home-grown pot roast deserves home-grown vegetables. I'll add some celery, but it will be store-bought. Celery is a fussy vegetable to grow so I don't.
It's sad to see the end of the garden year, but Mother Nature is certainly giving it a magnificent send-off. I don't think I've ever seen more spectacular colors. When I looked across the valley just before dusk yesterday, the sun set the trees ablaze.
