Weren't those few Indian Summer days heaven! I spent every minute outdoors, reveling in the balmy weather, raking leaves, putting the raspberry and asparagus beds to bed, cleaning up the vegetable garden. As I was pulling up the tomato stakes and uprooting giant broccoli bushes I was also busy composing today's column. I find that if I don't write down all the good and bad things that occurred in the vegetable garden each summer, I will forget them all by the time I start planting the following spring.
As I was dumping the last wheelbarrow load of frost-blackened potato vines on the compost pile, I realized I should be taking some sort of picture to go with the column, With hardly anything left in the garden, the sad little arrangement of vegetables I managed to put together was so uninteresting I asked Clover to pose beside them. She hates having her picture taken, but she reluctant agreed, squinting uncomfortably at the camera.
Reviewing the good and bad of the summer's vegetable garden isn't my idea of a great column, but at least I'll have a record and maybe you'll find some of it helpful. Because misery loves company, and I've learned that several gardeners have had similar problems, let's start with the Brussels sprouts. I love these little cabbages when home-grown and not overcooked. I've never had a problem growing them before, and it's always a treat to harvest a green vegetable from the garden as late as Thanksgiving. I bought and planted a half dozen seedlings that looked healthy and grew into sturdy-stemmed plants, but by September when the weather turned cool, the sprouts were no bigger than collar buttons.
My friend Pam told me to break off the leaves to encourage the sprouts, but it didn't seem to do much good. Last week a few little collar buttons had reached the size and texture of marbles. It took two whole plants' worth, but I harvested enough for dinner (I'm once again the cook as Hank is not yet back on his feet) and they were really surprisingly good. I've left three plants in the garden in hopes the sprouts will get even bigger.
A failure even more serious than the Brussels sprouts was the peas. Trying to split open the pods of the peas I raised this summer was harder than trying to open a walnut with your bare hands. I don't raise peas to freeze or even to have for dinner, just to eat raw as a reward for weeding the garden, but these peas were almost a penalty instead of a reward. My fingernails would dig, bit by bit, down the pod's seam, inevitably spilling half the loosened peas into the dirt before I could eat the other half.
Admittedly I didn't plant my peas until I got home from Italy in late May, but I don't think that caused the problem. I bought the seeds at Walmart. They were cheap, but no bargain. Live and learn. It's best to buy good seeds from a reputable seed company.
I'm getting all the bad news over with first, so now we must talk about tomatoes. It seems to me that the hybrid tomatoes of today have hardly any taste. The tomatoes we had in Italy were tart, melt-in-your-mouth varieties with real flavor. The ones I raised were dull and almost as tasteless as the supermarket variety. I suspect I can blame it on the hybridizers, who care more about shelf-life than taste. I've just sent away for a catalog of Heirloom seeds, in hopes that it will contain some nice old-fashioned varieties, still acid and really tasty.
I don't normally grow my tomatoes in the same area two years in a row, but because I couldn't use a third of the garden this summer while the new stone wall was being built, I had to, with dire results. Almost all my plants had a major blight, their lower leaves turning brown and dying, so that by the time the fruit ripened there were hardly any leaves left. Whether it was fusarium or vertiicilium wilt or some other dread disease I never was sure, but all these enemies, once contaminating the soil, are extremely hard to eliminate. I hate the thought of spraying my plants with a fungicide every couple of weeks (the recommended schedule) but I'm not happy with dying tomato plants either.
The pepper harvest contained both good and bad news. I bought eighteen pepper seedlings, 12 green bells and 6 yellow bells, because peppers are one of the easiest vegetables to freeze. All you do is cut them up, lay them out on a cookie sheet to freeze and then scoop them into freezer bags. Unfortunately when the ones labeled Yellow Bell Peppers appeared they were very green and shaped like hearts instead of bells. I waited for them to turn yellow, but they turned bright red. By that time their skins were so tough they needed to be peeled. Very annoying! That's the second year I've bought mislabeled pepper seedlings.
OK. That's all the bad news. The good news included beautiful Swiss chard called Bright Lights with stems in white, yellow and fuchsia. I think Swiss chard is as good a green as spinach and far easier to grow. Furthermore, its roots can spread six or seven feet out and down. That's as good as having dozens of earthworms tunneling in the soil and leaving good organic material in their wake.
Another big success was the lettuce seeds I got from Burpee, a gourmet blend of Grand Rapids, Royal Oakleaf, Salad Bowl and Ruby. The oakleaf shot up like little oak trees, but never got bitter. We picked the leaves for almost two months straight, and last week I transplanted some new seedlings into the cold frame, so hopefully we'll have lettuce right up until Christmas.
I've had better vegetable gardens, but considering the soggy summer, this year's produce could have been worse. And as we gardeners always say each fall "Wait 'til next year!"
