People say the ancients constructed their calendars to keep track of religious holidays, based on astronomical events. Possibly true. But a nice side benefit of their religion is that it gave them a clear idea of when to plant their crops in the spring.
In the modern world, of course, we eschew such religion-based planting rituals. Thus my potatoes will go in the ground on St. Patrick’s day, and no sooner. Because that’s Science.
If left to my own devices, I would undoubtedly plant too early. Hence the need for my quasi-religious planting ritual. Here in Vienna VA, today’s high is expected to be near 80. Which definitely gets me in a gardening frame of mind. But tomorrow’s low is well below freezing. We’re still six weeks from our likely last-frost date.
Without getting into whys and wherefores of our ever-wackier weather, this post presents my vegetable garden plan for the year. It takes the form of three questions:
A brief recap
I started my current round of gardening in order to have something to do during the pit of the COVID-19 pandemic. If nothing else, shoveling around a few tons of dirt to create raised beds provided much-needed exercise (Post G05).
Many people did the same, leading to shortages of everything gardening-related in 2020. Starting with empty seed racks at my local hardware stores (Post #G02, April 21, 2020) and ending with a long-lasting shortage of canning jar lids (Post #G21, August 2020).
Gardening was a much nicer experience then than now. The cessation of much local and long-distance travel meant that the air was cleaner, the skies were blue-er (Post #614, Post #618) , and neighborhoods were a lot quieter. So quiet I could hear the hum of the bees at work in the garden (Post #G11), a sound I have not heard since. A big bed of sunflowers, just outside my bedroom window, provided much-needed cheer during what was otherwise a fairly dark time.
But now, the air once again stinks of diesel exhaust, the Northern Virginia summer sky has returned to its traditional smog-white, the constant noise of traffic and construction smothers sound of the bees, and gyms are open for business.
In other words, things are back to normal.
1: Why? It’s now my hobby.
When I distill it down, I’m going to continue to garden for four reasons.
One, it gives me a physical activity that actually has a purpose. Sure, I can go to the gym, and get exercise for exercise’s sake. I can walk around the neighborhood, for the sake of walking around the neighborhood. Gardening is a way to get non-pointless exercise.
Two, I really like growing plants. I guess I can come out and say that. Mostly food. But flowers are OK, in moderation.
Third, I’m cheap. As hobbies go, annual costs don’t get much cheaper than a few pounds of potatoes and a few packets of seeds. I’m not convinced that my gardening pays for itself in the value of produce. But the fact that I get anything at all useful out of a hobby is a bonus in and of itself.
Finally, it leaves nothing permanent. What isn’t eaten turns to compost. So, unlike (say) woodworking, this doesn’t produce yet-more-clutter, during a period of my life when I’m doing my best to get rid of stuff
2: What? Only stuff we like to eat.
In an intellectual breakthrough this year, I’ve decided on the following guidelines:
- Only plant stuff that we actually like to eat.
- Don’t plant stuff that the deer like to eat
- Don’t plant stuff that the bugs like to eat.
- Don’t plant stuff susceptible to diseases common in my garden.
Being the kind of guy I am, I of course formalized that with a spreadsheet. But it doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.
Yellow: Certain herbs and herb-like plants rank highly here because they are extremely easy to grow, take up little room and cost an arm and a leg at the store. So, dill and rosemary, which I already grow, and ginger and turmeric, which are apparently easy to grow from grocery-store-purchased product.
Light blue: Potatoes, sweet potatoes, and winter squash. These all provide a lot of calories per square foot and (so far) have been both extremely easy to grow and highly productive in my garden. Plus, we like to eat them.
Red: Tomatoes and sweet peppers. Easy to grow, we like to eat them. Say no more.
Dark blue: The entire garlic and onion clan. I’ve had such spotty luck with these over the years, I’m going to skip them this year. Plus, my yields have been lousy.
Green: Peas, beans, lettuce, okra. We like to eat them just fine, but all require significant fuss. And, except for green beans, in a good year, yields are modest at best. But peas and lettuce can go in when it’s cold, and my wife likes green beans. So these are definitely going to get planted. Some. Not a lot.
Purple: Cucumbers and summer squash. I’ve had such a bad time with insect pests that I’m skipping those this year.
3: How? When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
After three years in the Virginia climate, my temporary raised beds are “showing their age”. Which is a nice way of saying “falling apart”. I put up a set of temporary raised beds during the pandemic, recycling some yard signs, bamboo, and other materials around the yard. Their temporary nature is now showing pretty badly.
I did that to minimize my investment. I figured that if gardening didn’t work out, I could just tear them apart, spread the dirt on the low spots on the lawn, and plant grass. Nothing wasted. Nothing headed for the landfill that wasn’t already headed there before I tried gardening.
So I’ve reached a fork in the road. Either I do what I had planned on originally, take the beds down, use the dirt to even out the lawn, and be done with gardening. Or kick it up a notch.
Separately, things snowballed beyond the mere construction of the beds. In addition to the beds, I now have irrigation line, various types of row cover and insect netting, trellising material, tomato cages, deer deterrent devices, and so on. Not a huge dollar investment, as these things go. But it’s a lot of stuff that serves no purpose outside of gardening.
The upshot is that I’m now going to go back and do this right. But only as a last resort. The patchwork of temporary beds of varying depths, oriented along the low spots of the lawn, will be replaced by a single long bed oriented east-west, with a permanent trellis along the back. This will simplify everything from irrigation to protection against deer, and dovetail with the remaining in-ground beds that are now devoted to cane fruits.
I quite like the coroplast (yard sign) sides, and as I have several long sheets of that around, the new bed is going to be coroplast-and-post as well. I see no reason to import materials if I have durable materials on hand that would otherwise be trash.
As an extra added bonus, this allows me to re-shovel the multiple tons of dirt that I ordered in the first place. Much better than wasting my time at the gym. And see how my hugelculture experiment turned out. There are trash pieces of wood at the bottoms of all these beds, and I’ll get to see what happened to them after three years in the soil.
The goal is to have a single, well-constructed bed of uniform depth, with trellising, deer protection, and irrigation built in. We’ll see how close I come to that ideal.
Conclusion
After three years of seat-of-the-pants gardening in temporary raised beds, I have reached a fork in the road. I’m going to take what I learned in the past three years, and move forward with a single permanent bed incorporating everything I think I need to grow a bit of vegetables and flowers in my back yard. And at that point, I’ll focus on a few things that we really like to eat fresh out of the garden and that seem to grow well in this climate. And hope for the best.
