Author (#18)August 2007 Archives
Growing herbs is one of the most cost-effective gardening you can do. For the price of a single serving of oregano or basil at your grocery store, you can buy a packet of seeds that will grow you ten or twentyfold that amount.
This year has been my most successful for herb gardening, and the secret this year has been using containers to grow multiple plants of each herb I wanted. Before, i would dedicate a small amount of ground space to a single plant each. Then what would happen is I could only harvest a small amount at a time, and it would take a week or two to grow back a usable amount. This year, I have 4 basil plants, at least 3 oregano plants, and 3 marjoram plants, and I can have fresh cuttings whenever I want. In fact, if I don't keep cutting, the basil threatens to flower and stop producing leaves altogether.
Our Flying Saucer summer squash has begun to produce fruit, and it's sublimely tasty, as is the first Black Beauty zucchini we harvested this weekend. Some partial pruning occurred this weekend to reclaim some bed space. Mostly around the raspberries which grew larger this year than ever. We tried to follow the suggestions in this nice PDF file, but really just ended up hacking them off to knee-high. They seem to come back stronger each year anyway, so unless they're noticeably lackluster next year, i don't think we'll have too many problems.
The aforementioned winter squash that had taken over the back plot revealed undiscovered dark green gourds, and one of the vines had even climbed a nearby tree and dangled two foot-long fruit. I'll report back if they taste any good.
Turn your back for a second, and they strike! Actually, more like turning your back for a week or two. The urban gardener isn't always quite as vigilant as the farmer, and sometimes the combination of the 8-to-5 grind and the small garden area makes you say, "I can skip a day, these plants grow pretty slowly." Bad decision.
Actually, the bad decision comes much earlier. Springtime, when the gardener is flush with anticipation and has all their seedlings in neat rows, the temptation is great to tell oneself that Chaos Is Vanquished. It's not until mid-to-late summer, when the gardener really finds out the consequences of earlier decisions. My mistake, a mistake I keep repeating and am probably doomed to repeat in future years, is to see the eager volunteer seedlings standing up forthright in the newly groomed beds and allow them to prosper, rather than yanking them out and planting my own. As I've alluded to before, sometimes these volunteers are a nice surprise and bear some interesting fruit. But other times, as in this year, they end up taking over the garden and giving not much in return.
This sprawling winter squash has spilled out of its own bed and threatens to take over the three adjacent beds. the flowering you see is the last of the spring broccoli, which was definitely a success for repeated harvests, so much so that we would have needed to eat broccoli almost every night to keep up with it. But now it's time (and rapidly becoming too late) to start the winter garden, and this squash will completely bollox that idea. Our plan is to go in and take back some of the bed space so we can get some fall planting done pronto.
