I’ve picked the last of my peppers, stripped the green tomatoes from the vines, set them up to pickle (shown above). All that’s left growing is a bit of stunted lettuce and spinach, and a few onions left to overwinter.
As I get my garden beds ready for the winter, I’ll summarize what I think I learned in my third year of being a serious vegetable gardener. Let me arrange this from choosing seeds to preserving the harvest.
Choice of varieties.
This isn’t everything I grow, it’s just plants where I had something to say.
For tomatoes, I settled on growing four broad classes. Varieties are shown in Post G22-001.
- Early season/cold tolerant,
- Heirloom “extra tasty” tomatoes,
- Paste (for drying), and
- Heat-tolerant (to keep yields up in August)
Early-season/cold-tolerant tomatoes were a total winner. I had tomatoes by June, and those plants continued to bear through October (Post G22-025). I judged the overall winner to be Fourth of July, a hybrid from Burpee Seeds. I’ll plant that again next year.
OTOH, my other tomato choices were flops. Two (paste, heat-tolerant) were due to operator error (deer damage, poor location, planted too late.) But of the three heirloom tomatoes I tried, the only one I will keep is Cherokee Purple. That produced a decent yield of consistently tasty tomatoes. For the other two (Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Chocolate Stripes), I simply couldn’t guess when they were ripe. I won’t grow those again (Post G22-051).
Ground cherries. I tried and rejected ground cherries (Post G22-029). They grew with no fuss, as advertised. But yield was tiny and harvesting was a pain. Plus, as it turns out, I don’t much like them. Mine, at least, were not sweet. I’m not growing them again.
Summer squash and cucumbers. I have a terrible time growing these due to insect pests (squash vine borer (Post G27), and cucumber beetle (various posts). For squash vine borer, I had mixed success spraying with Spinosad (Post G21-044). That’s only bulletproof if you stake the squash vines up, off the ground, and it’s a lot of work in any case. For cucumber beetle, I never found a method of killing them that I was comfortable with, because I don’t want to use (e.g.) Sevin or similar pesticide dusts. Nothing I tried worked at all, including methods that get a generally good reputation on the internet (such as yellow sticky traps).
This year I tried growing parthenocarpic varieties under insect netting (Post G22-013, Post G22-050). The upshot is that the “parthenocarpic” part didn’t work out, but that growing under netting is a pesticide-free way to avoid the worst of the squash vine borer. Timed right, I end up with large, flowering summer squash by August 1 or so. At that point, there’s only an occasional squash vine borer visiting the garden, and I can take the netting off and get some summer squash. For cucumbers, by contrast, this didn’t work at all, because the cucumber beetle appears to be a year-round pest in my garden now.
I’m not sure if I’m going to try growing under netting again, or not.
Winter squash. I experimented last year, but I’ve settled on good old Waltham Butternut squash, and on Dickinson pumpkin (which, despite the name, size, and shape, is just a gigantic winter squash, and tastes more-or-less exactly the same as butternut squash.) These are pretty much hassle-free, although I do wrap the pumpkins in floating row cover to keep the squirrels confused. I’ll plant these again next year.
Potatoes. I finally figured out exactly why you typically can’t use store-bought potatoes as seed potatoes (Post G22-004). And yet, sometimes, you can. The answer is organic potatoes can’t be treated with the most potent and toxic sprout inhibitor. So, either buy certified seed potatoes, or plant organic potatoes from the grocery store. Chit early and often. Consider no-dig planting if you’ve got money to burn and/or a cheap source of straw (Post #1073).
Sweet potatoes. God’s gift to the lazy and untalented gardener. Buy them from the store in late winter, sit them in some damp potting soil until they sprout, plant the slips (sprouts). Water well. If you want more, cut a foot off the ends of some vines, strip off most of the leaves, and plant those. Nice to have a food plant that’s so aggressive it can strangle the weeds. Definitely planting again. No idea what variety I’m planting, because it’s whatever is in the grocery store.
Beets, turnips, radishes. Nix. I’m just giving up on these. I can’t seem to get a decent-sized root in my soil, and I’m the only one in my family who will eat them.
Eggplant. Nix. Grows well, nobody else in my family will eat it. Skipping that next year.
Heavy-hitter Okra. This was a disappointment. I grew about ten okra plants, of the “heavy hitter” strain. These are supposed to produce multiple flower heads per plant and to be extremely productive. What we actually got was some nice-looking plants with mediocre production. Throughout the summer, we managed to get one pod per two plants per day. I’m going to try a different strain next year, but I suspect that I’m just going to have to plant a field of okra if we’re ever going to have a surplus of it.
Seed starting
Fluorescents are obsolete. I had been using a two-bulb four-foot shop light as a grow light, for staring plants inside. This year I “rewired” it (basically, gutted it) and (eventually) successfully installed LED replacement bulbs (Post G22-003). The LEDs use about half the electricity that the fluorescents used.
Window box is best. That said, the cheapest source of grow light is the sun. I’m not very good at using a cold frame — I typically end up frying my plants on a sunny day. So I made a cheap, temporary window box out of some clear plastic totes (Post G22-003). That worked fine and was climate-controlled.
Dump the peat pellets, use paper bags instead. For years, I have started seeds using peat pellets. These are convenient, and hold together well as you move your seedlings from place to place. But a couple of things happened this year that have made me change my mind on peat pellets.
First, I had an exceptionally productive year for winter squash. Easily four times the yield I’ve had in any prior year. Here’s a picture of some of what I harvested. Those butternuts came from just four Waltham butternut vines.
But the only thing I did differently this year was to start those squash seedlings without using peat pellets. I started them in cups, then moved them to doubled-up paper lunch bags (Post G22-012, Post G22-017). As I pulled up those vines, this year, I noticed that they seemed to have exceptionally well-developed roots.
This got me to wondering whether those peat pellets inhibit root formation. I stopped using peat pots long ago for exactly that reason. I’d pull plants up at the end of the season, only to find that they were root-bound inside those un-degraded peat pots.
As I pulled up my late tomato vines, I decided to compare those that had been started in peat pellets, and those that had been started in cups of potting soil. These are plants of about the same size and that were started at the same time.
These were both photographed at arms length. Note that the peat pellet is still largely intact (left). And that the plant grown without using a peat pellet (right) has an obviously much more developed root structure, with a far longer tap root and longer side roots as well.
As it turns out, I am not the only person to have noticed this. If you Google peat pellet root bound, you’ll find lots of stories and pictures showing plants that became totally root bound in a peat pellet. Some then suggest cutting up the mesh that holds the peat pellet together, but to me, that kills the main advantage of planting the intact peat pellet, which is that you avoid transplant shock.
The upshot of this is that I’m tossing out my peat pellets, and starting plants in doubled-up paper bags from now on. Those bags get quite fragile by the time they get planted, but that’s the whole point. You want them to be just at the point of falling apart when they are put into the ground.
Timing, frosts, and days to maturity
Fall garden flops. Two years in a row now, I’ve followed standard gardening advice and planted some fall crops in the garden. I’ve direct-sown some greens and such. And two years in a row, that’s been a total flop. Here’s the writeup for last year (G21-057). It’s pretty much ditto for this year.
The upshot is that while I can direct-sow seeds in late August in Zone 7, it’s probably going to be a complete waste of time. As the days shorten and the temperatures cool, plants begin to grow not just more slowly, but much more slowly. I did the analytics on this in Post G22-061.
The upshot is that you can either put in some sort of poly tunnel or greenhouse, or you can start your fall crops in pots in July, so that you are planting out month+ seedlings. What I can’t do is direct sow (e.g.) lettuce and spinach at the end of August and expect to have usable yield.
Frost protection alone isn’t worth it. This year, I nailed down the ins and outs of frost protection. Aluminized fabric or space blanket radiant barrier works great (Post G22-005). Mason jars (and some types of plastic) work great, because they are radiant barriers (Post G22-006). Some other plastics work, but polyethylene sheeting or floating row cover has no impact. Basically, those are worthless for frost protection (Post G22-005).
But this year, as I was hustling and putting my plants in early and protecting them when there was a threat of frost — it occurred to me that this is largely a waste of time (Post G22-009).
Why? See Fall Garden Flops above. If it’s that early in the spring, when it’s cold out, plants grow at a snail’s pace. You put in a huge amount of effort to keep those plants from freezing, and your reward is a tiny head start on the gardening year.
To get a head start on the growing season, it seems like it’s far smarter to keep growing your seedlings in some sort of protected (i.e., warmed) space, then plant those much larger seedlings into the garden only after things have warmed up. That means setting up some sort of poly tunnel with frost protection — to raise daytime temperatures for the plants and prevent nighttime freezes. Or keeping your seedlings in some sort of cold frame/window box arrangement until they are much older and larger than you would normally grow them.
In any case, my take on it is that planting early, into a cold garden, and hustling to provide frost protection, is all pain and (almost) no gain. I’m not going to do that next year. If I need frost protection, it’s too early to plant.
Days to maturity does not tell you much. I worked through all the details on what “days to maturity” means, as printed on seed packets, in Post G22-025. The reality is that a) that figure is for ideal growing conditions, b) that’s just the date on which under ideal conditions you can pick your first ripe crop, and c) in spring and fall — when that figure really matters — days to maturity will be vastly higher than the number cited on the seed pack. See Fall Garden Flops above.
The bottom line is that if you start from your fall first frost date, and count backward by “days to maturity”, you are nowhere near the correct date for planting seeds for a fall crop. You have to plant them much, much earlier than that to be able to expect to harvest anything.
Water
Irrigation. For a little home garden, it turns out that an effective irrigation system can be incredibly simple, quick to install, reasonably cheap, and will work with rain barrels or city water. See post G22-037 and further references in that post. I can’t believe I went through two years of carrying buckets all over the garden. If I had it to do over, I’d put in irrigation from the start.
Hose timers. These always seem to fail after a few years. With my last failure, I did an autopsy to figure out why they die, then modified my new timer accordingly (Post G22-028).
Rain barrels. I think rain barrels are a good thing, and I have a bunch of them. But no matter how many I have, I always seem to run out of water anyway. And I end up using city water, run through an activated charcoal filter to remove the chloramines.
So I did a “micro-simulation” model of a rain barrel system, using the actual historical rainfall data for my area (Post G21-043). And, sure enough, practically speaking, you are always going to run out of water. As it turns out, for a small garden like mine, the first few rain barrels do a lot of good, and then the benefit per additional rain barrel decreases rapidly. And, don’t kid yourself that you’re doing much for the environment by using rain barrels. I think that if I’d known this from the start, I’d have put in a couple of rain barrels and called it quits. For a few hundred square feet of garden beds, a large rain barrel system is mostly a waste.
Staking, mulching, weeding.
Sprawl technique for tomatoes (Post G22-018). That’s a big No on that one. They grow fine. In fact, the probably grow better if allowed to sprawl than they do if staked, because they put out secondary roots. But harvesting is a nightmare, and you lose a lot of the crop to bugs. I used the sprawl technique this year because I had an injury that made it hard to get around. I’d never do that again. I’m staking and/or caging my tomatoes from now on.
Oh, and sprawl technique with green tomatoes? Dumb squared. Sprawl technique with black plastic mulch, in Virginia summer? Tomatocide. Just don’t go there.
Woven black plastic ag fabric instead of mulch. I gave this a try this year, again because I had some problem getting around in the spring, and I figured this would be a labor-saving measure.
I see this being used all over YouTube. I couldn’t quite figure out how plants could possibly handle the heat stress of all that black plastic with the sun beating down on it. Turns out, by and large, mine couldn’t. Some plants were just outright killed by the heat. Some were stunted. Some — mostly beefy upright plants like okra — handled it OK.
In the end, I’d say that it’s OK if you put this down, then spread straw or other light-colored mulch on top. It’s OK if you use it as straight-up weed blocking fabric. It probably works OK if you’ve got enough foliage to keep the black plastic cloth in the shade. But (e.g.) planting peppers, tomatoes, cucumber, and squash seedlings through holes in woven black plastic was simply a mistake. Those that the heat did not kill outright clearly appear to have been heat-stressed anywhere any part of the plant touched the plastic.
I don’t think I’m going to use that again as anything but weed-block ag fabric. I don’t think I’ll try to grow my seedlings through it.
Weeding. I looked into numerous organic weed killers, and decided that I might as well just use a weed-whacker (Post G22-046). With one exception, organic weed killers (e.g., strong vinegar) are burn-down weed killers. They kill the top of the plant, but not the roots.
I also tried using bamboo leaves as a natural weed killer, with inferior results (Post G22-060).
If nothing else, I gained a better understanding of why people use Roundup in their yards, even if I won’t touch the stuff. If you want to kill a plant roots and all, you don’t really have any good organic choices.
Pests and diseases.
Electric fence for deer. After years of trying various deer-deterrent devices, I rage-purchased the equipment to set up a small, portable electric fence (Post #G22-018). These are reasonably cheap and ridiculously easy to set up. The “wire” is more of a twine with embedded metal fibers. You run that through plastic step-in posts. You’ll need to pound in a grounding rod, that’s just about the only work involved. And you’ll need to be able to run an extension cord to where the charger is attached to the fence.
Deer damage effectively ceased for as long as I ran it. Wish I’d thought of it sooner, and this is now a permanent part of my backyard suburban gardening setup.
I also run a Yard Enforcer motion-activated sprayer. This works, with a few caveats. It tends to trigger off randomly when faced with bright sunshine on broad, fluttering leaves. And the hose connection began to leak until I replaced the original cheap vinyl hose gasket with a standard 10-cent rubber hose gasket. Otherwise, it shows no signs of deterioration after one season of use. And the deer will stay out of the area it sprays.
Otherwise, I have retired the rest of my arsenal of deer deterrents. Search for that category on this website if you want to see what else I was using.
Wrap your pumpkins to keep the squirrels off (Post G30). For the second year in a row, I wrapped floating row cover around my pumpkins. This appears to work perfectly to keep the squirrels from gnawing on them. That’s now a standard part of what I do when I grow pumpkins.
Powdery mildew. The first year I gardened, I had to put in the time just to learn the lingo (Post G15). Because, as it turns out, most commercial treatments for powdery mildew don’t actually kill powdery mildew (“eradicants”), they only claim to help prevent its spread (“protectants”). Next you have to realize that virtually no home-remedy type powdery mildew treatments work (Post G19). Despite having people swear by them in various internet posts. Or, at least, did not work on whatever strain of mildew I had in my garden. Finally, once you do come up with something that will kill powdery mildew, what you find is that a) you have to keep spraying it, and b) what you end up with is a heavily damaged plant anyway (Post G20).
That learning is summarized in Post G20. The upshot of all that is that you ideally want to spray to prevent powdery mildew, not to try to cure some that has already set in.
I tried to test a couple of preventatives this year, one a commercial copper-based spray, the other a weak citric acid solution (Post G22-039, Post G22-040). Nature did not cooperate, in that I didn’t ever get significant powdery mildew in the garden until very late in the garden year. At which point, I can certify that weak citric acid solution does not kill existing powdery mildew (Post G22-060) .
French marigolds. I’ve bought a lot of “deer proof” flower mixes. And yeah, you can get some flowers, and yeah, maybe the deer won’t eat some of them, even if they are desperate.
But let me tell you a few things about french marigolds:
- They form spectacular masses of flowers.
- Native bees and some butterflies love them, based on my observation.
- They last through the end of fall.
- They are tough as all get out, and easily out-compete with the weeds. To some extent, they become the weeds.
- They stink when disturbed. I mean, really stink. Which I think explains the next point.
- I’ve never seen even the slightest indication of deer damage.
- The seeds are easily saved.
Food Preservation
Vinegar pickles do not require salt. If you are making a traditional vinegar-based pickle, the salt is there solely for flavor. It it not necessary for the preservation of the food. Accordingly, I tried making a sodium-free vinegar dill pickle. The results were … OK. Edible. Definitely pickle-like. I’m undecided as to whether I’d do that again, but for sure, I can’t take the high-salt diet one gets with home-canned vinegar pickles following a traditional recipe. (See Post G22-031, Post G22-032, Post G22-036).
FWIW: Neither pickle crisp (calcium chloride) nor soaking the cucumbers in ice had any impact on the crispness of the pickle. Based on my final batches, you can replace salt with salt substitute measure-for-measure in a vinegar pickle recipe and get a reasonably salty-tasting pickle without significant off notes. And it definitely helps to replace about half the vinegar acidity with citric acid acidity, following standard canning formulas as described in the posts above. Finally, because these salt-free pickles tended to have a somewhat tough skin, you get a better product processing them as spears rather than as whole pickles.
Freezing is the most energy-efficient way to preserve tomatoes if and only if you are going to be running that freezer anyway. That’s the gist of Post G22-010. It is also by far the easiest. And the skins slip right off the tomatoes afterwards (same post).
These days, I mostly preserve them by making tomato sauce on the stove, then freezing that in vacuum-sealed bags. FWIW, my process is as follows:
- Pressure-cook tomatoes for a minute or two, followed by natural pressure release.
- Run the results through a Foley mill to take out skins and most seeds.
- Boil that down to sauce consistency.
- Place in vacuum bags, freeze, then vacuum-seal the frozen sauce.
I’ve stopped making tomato sauce in a crock-pot because it takes forever and is energy inefficient. A crock pot is a poor device for reducing reducing tomato juice down to tomato sauce.
An ideal garden setup, based on three years’ experience.
I threw my garden together in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a way to get some exercise, and have something to do. I set the whole thing up out of recycled materials, including a bunch of coroplast political protest signs that I had printed up for use in the Town of Vienna, VA, and some bamboo I had cut down in my yard (Post G05).
If I had to do a raised-bed garden over, from scratch, I would:
- Orient the bed(s) east-west, for best access to sun.
- Have one long bed, about 3′ deep from front-to-back.
- Have a permanent trellis on the back of the bed, to stake up plants.
- Have 1/2″ irrigation pipes installed at the surface, before planting, run to the nearest tap or water barrels.
- Have an electric fence permanently mounted around the bed, to deter deer.
- Accommodate a polycarbonate panel or other method for creating a temporary spring cold frame/autumn season extender.
- Accommodate insect-proof netting, as needed.
I am still not quite ready to go full-on to growing in a greenhouse. There are advantages to that, but any greenhouse I could build would end up being one great big disposable, as the various plastics broke down.
I think that, on this forthcoming re-build, I’m looking for something a bit more permanent, a bit less disposable, and something that incorporates all the varied temporary structures that I’ve set up over the past three years of gardening.
