My First Real Garden – 2020 Summary

Despite my love of nature, I’ve never had much of a green thumb. When my husband and I met, I could barely feed myself, let alone my plants (I am so lucky he is a good cook!). The only plants I could keep alive were succulents, which are built to withstand the hardship of arid environments and the neglect of absent-minded owners. I inherited two raised bed planter boxes from the prior owners of my house and succeeded in growing a few herbs (much of which went unused) and a pepper plant over the last few years, but never anything substantial. More recently I’ve favored native perennials that are adapted to my region and basically grow themselves after they are established. Enter 2020 – panic buying, empty grocery store shelves, and social distancing led me and much of the country to get back to our roots and become self-sufficient homesteaders, tending our gardens and raising our own food. Well, I can’t say I’ve mastered the homestead life, but looking back on 2020, I’m really happy with the progress I made toward fostering my green thumb and supplanting the grocery store (get it? I’m sorry… bad puns). This year we put in a 72 square-foot raised bed garden in addition to the two 2 foot x 8 foot planter boxes we inherited, grew pots of bell peppers and various lettuces, and even added three new raspberry plants in place of an overgrown privacy hedge. In total, I grew over 21 types of vegetables, herbs, and fruits this year. Some of them succumbed to diseases and pests, and others I realized I just didn’t really like and went to the compost pile (cough cough kale), but overall I had a very fruitful year! I had a lot of fun creating a garden journal to document my gardening year. I color coded each plant I grew by family, and seeing the list of everything I grew felt like a big accomplishment: I had even more fun drawing a color-coded garden map of my garden from early to late season. The colors are helping me remember the different plant families and how I should plan my crop rotation next year. It was such a fun activity, I’m going to create a new map each year.

Early in the pandemic, I colonized part of a shelf in my basement by rearranging my husbands wood working tools, and soon realized that the spot I picked was too cold and seed germination was poor, so I added some heat mats to the arrangement. Soon after that, I realized I had started too many seeds for my half-shelf’s worth of space and needed to upgrade. I bought a collapsible greenhouse stand and more grow lights, and moved to a warmer section of the basement. Now, my seedlings were doing fantastic. My seedlings thrived until my basement was infested by aphids and fruit flies, but most of the plants survived the assault and were planted in the garden. Only a few, like my tomato and second set of brassica seedlings, appeared too diseased had to be sacrificed. It was a challenge getting wood from the home improvement stores due to high demand of everyone building gardens. As annoying as it was trying to get supplies, it was awesome that so many people were interested in growing their own food, whether to avoid the grocery store, reduce exposure to pesticides, or even reduce fuel emissions from transporting food across the country and around the world.

Finally by the end of May, we were able to construct our 76 square-foot raised bed, which is essentially two 4 foot x 8 foot beds connected into a U shape. I have a ton of space to work with, but I think I made the bed a little too big – reaching into the outer corners from the inside of the U is difficult and having to reach from the outside through or over the fence is a pain. But, I could always remove the fence, do what I have to do, and then put it back up. My plants were growing wonderfully indoors, but after hardening them off and transplanting them outside, it was apparent that something was horribly wrong. Things barely grew and then started to die off. Squashes turned pale yellow and began to shrivel, strawberry leaves turned a dark red, and everything seemed to suffer for no apparent reason. I tested the “compost-enriched” soil we purchased from a local garden supply store to support a local business, and not only was it devoid of nutrients, it was incredibly dense.

My poor little planties were being starved and suffocated by the soil around them. So, a few weeks later, we shoveled out almost all of the bad dirt (it did not deserve to be called “soil”) and replaced it with bagged soil from a big chain hardware store along with compost from my friend’s garden. All of the dying transplants were replanted in the fresh soil, and they rebounded immediately. The only ones I didn’t replant were the peas and pole beans, mostly because they weren’t totally dead and it would have been impossible to dig up and transplant them attached to their trellises. My friend donated two of her tomato seedlings to replace the ones that had succumbed to aphids since it was too late in the season to start new ones. Her compost also donated a few mystery squash seeds, one of which turned out to be a butternut squash.

I bought cages for the tomato plants, but it became apparent that the cherry tomato plant gifted to me by my friend was extra happy and kept growing everywhere, including through the walkway. And the squashes were exploding out of the confines of the garden bed, the trellises I bought far too small. So I went to the local farm and feed store and picked up two cattle panels, one for my cherry toms and another for my butternut squash. It was a real challenge transporting 16 ft cattle panels on my car and setting them up in the garden by myself, since they are quite unwieldy, but I managed without too many scratches on the car or myself. I had to untangle the butternut squash from my shorter trellis and set up my vining yellow squash plant on it, and draped the out-of-control butternut over the cattle panel. Thankfully, I didn’t break any of the vines in the process!

I really love how much space the cattle panels opened up, so will definitely incorporate these in next year’s garden. Unfortunately I didn’t take any late season pictures after the cherry tomatoes grew over the trellis (in the photo to the right they are still un-trellised and out of control), but I will definitely use it to grow indeterminate tomatoes and vining squash in the future. It also made harvesting tomatoes easily – I could just reach up and grab them instead of digging through the dense foliage. Early in summer, the lettuces thrived in pots and we made salads frequently. I realized that my excitement for growing my own salad greens was unable to make up for the fact that I just really don’t like salad. Nevertheless, some goat cheese and olive oil made it bearable. Some things were total fails: the cauliflowers and broccoli were either too stunted by their stint in the crappy dirt or it had become too warm for them to form heads by the time they were transplanted to fresh soil. I didn’t eat a single leaf of kale or swiss chard. The pole beans produced beans, but I stashed them in my fridge and forgot about them, leaving them to be composted. However, I got to see the beans start to grow, and I thought it was so neat to see what baby beans look like.

I took copious amounts of pictures of each harvest to remember what I got out of my garden, which would have been a great idea for an Instagram account but was a really poor choice because now I would have to scroll back through hundreds of various garden pictures to figure out how many fruits I harvested. That’s a lot of effort, so next year I will record in my newly-acquired garden journal each time I harvest produce. I do know that in my inaugural tomato sauce making attempt, I made over a gallon of tomato sauce from 11.5 pounds of our sprawling indeterminate cherry tomato and the determinate slicers plants gifted to me by my friend.

We harvested a good amount of bell peppers, but probably could have had more. The clay pots I chose were too small for the peppers and they dried out more frequently in the summer heat, so those peppers didn’t get nearly as large as those that were grown in self watering pots or directly in the ground. However, we did discover that our dog goes nuts for green peppers (our least favorite) so he got an extra dose of vitamin C and we didn’t waste our green peppers. I also managed to get a few carrots, mostly stunted and mutated but one perfectly straight one! Most were delicious. I’ve heard they taste better in the cold weather so next year I hope to try growing some fall and winter carrots.

I planted onion sets from another friend too deep at first, so they were growing greens but not producing bulbs. So I dug them up again and replanted in a mounded hill with the top of the forming bulb just below the soil surface. I ended up getting small bulbs about an inch in diameter with one or two getting to be closer to 2 inches, but was happy that most of them survived. We got a fair amount of yellow squash and only a few zucchinis, as these plants were plagued early by squash borers. Interestingly, one yellow squash turned out particularly orange, and when we cut into it it was completely hard inside like a butternut. I think that the female squash flower was fertilized with pollen from one of the male butternut flowers across the garden. We weren’t able to eat it but it was cool to see the mules of the squash world.

We also hacked down some massive schip laurels that had overstayed their welcome by several years and were easily over 15 ft tall. We’d forgotten to prune them the first year or so after we moved in, and they went from big to giant in just a short time and started swallowing our patio. The privacy fence they created was excellent, but we were ready for a change. In their place we planted blue arrow junipers for a hopefully more manageable privacy fence and added 3 raspberry plants at the southern end of the patio. I ran out of plant cages and eventually had to erect a fence around the raspberry patch because some rogue critters kept trampling on the smallest raspberry.

Every time he would try to rebound, another thoughtless critter would stomp on him. Even though I bought bare-root canes, these guys were pumping out raspberries by late summer and continued well into the fall. I think I was supposed to remove the flower buds and encourage them to form more roots but I just could not resist fresh, free, organically grown raspberries! Hopefully they survive the winter and put out even more raspberries next year.

I added a new composter in the beginning of the pandemic. I had one of those rolly barrel type ones that just seemed to be too small or too neglected to ever form usable compost despite filling it for 3+ years. This larger bin wasn’t as convenient as the rolly one, but I undertook my daily compost turning chore with diligence and actually got a bucket of compost within a few months. We also installed two rain barrels crafted by a local company out of recycled olive barrels (Camel’s Hump Rain Barrels). I love the red color and feel like the barrels are exceptionally well crafted, and the fact they are recycled makes me feel much better about acquiring them. I wish they were bigger but 58 gallons is still a lot of water! I used the two rain barrels exclusively to water our raspberries, potted strawberries and peppers, and three raised beds. I did not have to turn on the hose once to water any of my vegetable plants. But hand watering every day is exhausting, so I hope to install drip irrigation and pump from my rain barrels next year. I’ll probably have to add a few more to store enough water for my irrigation.  

What was most interesting to me throughout this garden experiment was how my definition of nature has shifted over the course of this year. I prefer mountainous landscapes and towering forests, but being immersed in the sprawling growth of my garden, I learned about so many more plants and insects that are a part of nature. Some are not my favorite, like aphids, squash borers, cabbage loopers, and cucumber beetles. Did you know there is a striped cucumber beetle and a spotted cucumber beetle? I sure didn’t. I could really do without those pests, but it was still neat to see all of the life that my garden brought about. I noticed many more bees this year than usual because of all of the various flowering fruit and veggie plants. The bees loved the large orange squash flowers were all about my ever-flowering indeterminate tomatoes and borage. My carrots and dill fed swallowtail caterpillars. I also got to watch this cicada killer drag his fallen prey to his lair. There were so many other things I learned about through this experience, I could have probably made this post twice as long. Some insects are not my favorite, like aphids, squash borers, cabbage loopers, and cucumber beetles. Did you know there is a striped cucumber beetle and a spotted cucumber beetle? I sure didn’t. I could really do without those pests, but it was still neat to see all of the life that my garden brought about. I noticed many more bees this year than usual because of all of the various flowering fruit and veggie plants. The bees loved the large orange squash flowers were all about my ever-flowering indeterminate tomatoes and borage. My carrots and dill fed swallowtail caterpillars. There were so many other things I learned about through this experience, I could have probably made this post twice as long. I ended the summer season too tired to maintain a fall and winter garden, but I learned a lot last year and am looking forward to getting a few things in the ground soon! Did you also have a successful pandemic gardening year? Let me know in the comments!