It’s been a while! The year seemed to fly by. A lot of the spring and summer was spent on the garden, and art fell a little bit by the wayside. I’ll write another post just on art, but it seemed to take a while after maternity leave for me to get back into the pattern and rhythm of art making. While I was finding my way back to my art making, the garden took up a lot of my creative energy. There is something so rewarding about being outside, using your hands, and nurturing these tiny seedlings. We experimented a lot in the garden this past year, and I wanted to quickly summarize some thoughts about things that went well and things that didn’t.

SPRING GARDEN

What we grew: snow peas, lettuce, cilantro

What went well:

had a ton of aphids on the snow peas and some on the lettuce, but then this attracted so many ladybugs! It was the first time I had ever seen so many lady bug larvae (they look pretty creepy to be honest). I love the balance of nature.

What to do different next year:

We tried to plant our summer garden too early, frost hit a lot of them hard. Next year we will use the time and space instead for fast growing plants like bokchoy and other asian greens instead of trying to get a head start on the warm season plants.

At this point in the year we were drowning in cucumbers and eggplants!

SUMMER GARDEN

What we grew: tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, tromboncino squash, eggplant, edamame, green beans, yardlong beans

What went well:

We put in a new garden in our front yard! It gets full sun and the plants loved it. We were able to grow so many more vegetables and flowers this year because of it.
We tried a few different vegetable varieties this year and a few really stood out. Sun Gold tomatoes were delicious and extremely disease resistant. We planted yardlong beans for the first time, and while the kids didn’t love the texture as much as regular green beans, they produced all season long and were still going strong through end of September. I’ll be planting them again next year (if only because I enjoy eating them). Suyo long cucumbers were another stand out — delicious and the texture & water content were perfect for making asian smashed cucumber salads.
A mixed bag: we tried injecting BT to protect our zucchini against the squash vine borers. Dusty ended up needing to use a drill to predrill a hole, then inject the BT mixture into the central stem, since a regular needle would just get completely clogged up by the fibrous stem. This worked with mixed effect - it definitely worked, and extended the lifespan of our zucchini plants significantly, but eventually all the plants succumbed to the vine borer by the end of the season.

What didn’t go so well:

We tried parthenocarpic zucchini and cucumbers in an effort to minimize pest pressure. Unfortunately, the parthenocarpic zucchini (Maveric from Johnny’s Seeds) did not taste as sweet or tender as regular zucchini. The parthenocarpic cucumbers on the other hand (Sweet Success from Burpee’s, and Sashimi from Johnny’s Seeds) were absolutely delicious, BUT the netting actually increased pest pressure. While it kept the squash bugs and cucumber beetles out, it provided a protected environment for spider mites, aphids, and fungal diseases to thrive, and made it more difficult to maintain and harvest. This was our biggest experiment this year and unfortunately did not work as well as I had hoped it would. Next year we will ditch the netting.
We also tried tromboncino squash the first time this year, having read that it is similar to a zucchini but much more pest resistant. While we did find the plant to be extremely resilient, we did not enjoy the taste. It does not replace, for me, the sweetness or texture of a zucchini. The plants themselves take up a lot of real estate and we really only ate them maybe 3-4 times. Our family actually prefers them as a winter squash rather than a summer squash so if we did grow them again I would likely wait to harvest them until they matured.

What we’re going to try next year:

In addition to trying more varieties of plants (I have a list of seeds on my wishlist already), the biggest thing I’d like to try next year is to be better at succession planting, specifically for zucchini - our plants were done by the end of August, but with how warm the weather has been I would love to have been able to continue to harvest going into September. I think with a combination of injecting BT + succession planting, we’ll be able to stretch out our zucchini season.
I also really missed eating leafy vegetables during the summer - most of the leafy veggies we eat (lettuce, asian greens) are cool season vegetables and the NC summer is too hot for them. Next year, I am going to try growing sweet potatoes, not for the tubers, but for the young shoots, which apparently can be stir-fried and used similarly to spinach

FALL GARDEN

This may be premature, but the fall garden is looking amazing so far. It, so far, seems to be the first year that we may be successful at growing broccoli, broccolini, cabbage, and carrots. Fingers crossed!