Time to wrap up the 2023 gardening year. These are the highlights.
1: Jambalaya okra was by far the most productive okra I’ve ever grown. I planted it because reliable sources said that, which I now ditto. Best guess, after counting pod scars on my plants, I got a bit over one pound of okra per square foot, for the entire season. That far outpaces the other three varieties I’ve tried (Clemson spineless, Heavy Hitter, Red Burgundy).
2: Snowbird peas were the most productive peas I’ve ever grown. Much more productive per square foot/per month than any other snow pea or sugar snap pea that I’ve grown.
3: Mustard was a dandy cover crop, but won’t yield edible seed if planted in the spring, in Virginia. Grows fast, flowers over an extended period, and keeps the weeds down. But a spring cover crop goes to seed in the heat of mid-summer, and mustard seed produced mid-summer in Virginia is all-but-inedible. I did figure out how to harvest, thresh, winnow a few hundred square feet of mustard. Search here if you want to see how I did that. But the results are so bitter and inferior as to be useless as a condiment.
4: No-dig potatoes were a failure when grown in leaf mulch. It’s traditional to do no-dig beds using hay or straw. That worked well for me, but around here, a bale of straw costs more than the potatoes are worth. So I tried cheaping out, growing three varieties of potatoes using free leaf mulch, available from Fairfax County. It took minimal effort, and the resulting potato plants looked fine. But the tubers were small and frequently mis-shapen. Pretty much a total flop. So I’m back to growing in dirt.
As a byproduct, I learned that russet potatoes do not do well in a warm climate. If I grow potatoes again, I’ll stick to white, red, or gold.
5) Aerial or trellised sweet potato vines work as advertised. Keep the vines off the ground and they can’t set secondary roots. So instead of getting a whole lot of little skinny sweet potatoes, everywhere the vines touched down, you get a few big sweet potatoes, right where you planted the slip. That’s much more usable.
6) County Fair (NOT Country Fair) cucumbers were a fail. I have cucumber beetles, which spread bacterial wilt. I’m not willing to use the chemicals required to kill those beetles. So I lose my cucumber crop every year. In all fairness, “resistant” is not the same as “immune”, but I only got a handful of cucumbers from County Fair before wilt killed them. They did last longer than other varieties I’ve tried, but they didn’t solve my problem.
7) A portable electric fence is an excellent deer deterrent, in my suburban neighborhood. Before I rage-purchased mine last year, I was about a half-century behind the times on this technology. Modern fences use step-in plastic posts strung with plastic twine embedded metal fibers, as above. It literally takes a few minutes to set one up or take it down. The only labor-intensive part is grounding them, but I just buried the grounding rod at the bottom of a raised bed, and that seems to work just fine. (It works because I don’t let the bed dry out.)
But don’t you shock the shit out of yourself when you brush up against it? Yep, sure do. That’s how you can tell its still working.
8) Surface-run irrigation is cheap, easy, and durable. This turns out to be one of those technologies where my only regret is that I waited so long to try it. My days of carrying watering cans around the garden are officially over. In a nutshell, plastic irrigation line cuts with a knife and connects together with simple push-and-twist connectors. The 1/2″ drip line irrigation works as either low-pressure (rain barrel) irrigation or high-pressure (city water) irrigation, though you need a $5 pressure reducer if you use city water. I need to rinse out the water filter every half-dozen uses or so, to clean out crap that comes out of my rain barrels and is caught by the filter. Otherwise, it works without a hitch.
9) Bonide copper seems to work well as a powdery mildew protectant. In a side-by-side test, the results were obvious to the eye. Plus, it’s cheap, per application, in the home garden, and it’s just a copper soap, so relatively harmless as long as you don’t hose down your garden with it. My sole remaining problem is to get off my duff and spray it before the powdery mildew shows up, because it won’t kill off an infection once it takes hold. It just keeps it from getting that initial foothold.
10) Your time may be shorter than you think. I continue to be surprised by how useless “days to maturity” and “first frost date” are, for planning my garden. Maybe it’s because I don’t get full sun, all day long. But plants take vastly longer to mature than you would guess from the “days to maturity” on the seed packets. And growing all-but-stops once the weather turns cool, which happens weeks-to-months before we get a killing frost. This year, I ended up planting my late-season tomato plants just a couple of weeks too late. I’m still working my way through the resulting bumper crop of green tomatoes.
