It's Been A While

It's been a while since I've had any interest in documenting my garden. Actually, it's been a while since I've had a great deal of interest in working in my garden. Ambivalence might be the right word to describe how I've been feeling about gardening. I still get a lot of joy from growing good things to eat when I can harvest them, but I had so many disappointments over the past few years because of the depredation of rodents that I'm wary of putting very much effort into growing things just to see them disappear. I can still dredge up the anguish and frustration and sheer rage that I felt over and over again a couple of years ago when rats and mice and voles attacked damn near everything that I tried to grow. I felt like they were not only stealing my veggies but they were also stealing a part of me. Cultivating vegetables was and I suppose still is a part of my identity. I just can't give it up. So for the past couple of years I've kept on trying to grow things but I've limited the scope of the garden and the amount of time that I spend out there.

Lately it seems that nature has finally reached some sort of equilibrium between predators and prey. Predators that I've seen or heard or heard of in the neighborhood - bobcats, mountain lions, coyotes, foxes, hawks, owls, and snakes have feasted on the critters that feasted on my garden. Over the past year I've tentatively removed the barriers that I had erected between rodents and veggies and now there are yards and yards and yards of hardware cloth and stacks of hardware cloth covered panels littering the area just outside my garden, relics of the rodent wars. I keep them just in case. It seems like a small miracle when I look at my garden and see vegetables growing and sprawling freely, in the open, nothing hemming them in except the edges of the planting boxes. Oh my. Am I tempting fate... the tomatoes haven't started to ripen yet...

So here, for the first time in over a year, I'm presenting a short tour of the garden. It's a far cry from July garden tours of years gone by but I'm feeling content with it.

Bed No. 1 is primarily home to cucurbits this summer. In the foreground is some Orion fennel that I planted there in January of 2019 and is now producing small shoots from the old roots.

The main action in this bed is the squash. Tromba d'Albenga, a longtime favorite, is climbing the trellis on the left. Tatume squash is climbing the trellis on the right. That's a new squash in my garden and it is living up to its reputation of being a rampant grower. Tatume is supposedly a heat loving squash and I wasn't sure how it would do in my cool coastal climate but it seems to be unfazed by the nighttime temperature dips down in the low 50Fº's. I'm already harvesting multiple squash most days and cutting back the vines that seem to want to take over the garden. San Pasquale is the bush zucchini in the foreground and is another newcomer to the garden.

And at the end of the bed are 2 new trellises, one with a baby Tetra Squash vine and the other with some Jamaican cucumbers the seeds for which were a gift when I renewed by membership with the Seed Savers Exchange. The portion of the bed in the foreground is still in transition from the winter garden. The old celery plants just don't want to quit pushing up new sprouts. I didn't grow a spring garden this year so there's still quite a few bare spots in the garden. 

Bed No. 2 is home to tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. Last year I grew neither tomatoes nor eggplant and I sorely missed them both. This year I'm only growing cherry tomatoes (Piccolo Dattero, Sweet Gold and Brad's Atomic Grape) and Marzano Fire paste tomatoes. I'm also growing fewer peppers than usual and only a few of my favorite varieties including Florina, Gogosar, Mehmets Sweet Turkish, and Odessa Market. 

The small plants in the front left are Badenjan Sesame eggplants. I put them in rather late and they are still very small but I hope that they will be producing by September or October which happen to be the warmest months of the year around here. They are supposed to be early producers so it's worth taking a chance. The back part of the bed has been left to its own devices for the past year. The mesh covered screen in the foreground is protecting a new planting of Speedy arugula.

Bed No. 3 has been the most neglected bed over the past year or so. Last year I grew a few peppers and some Cardoons and this spring I planted a row of favas but other than that I let grow what chose to grow. Unfortunately that meant that tree roots invaded and now I've got some digging to do. The trellises shown below are supporting some Oregon Giant snow peas and a mix of pole beans. The snow peas are just finishing up a stellar run and the beans are just getting started. You can see the cardoon flowers reaching for the sky in the background.

Down in this corner of the bed I'm trying to grow some bush snap beans and this was the first indication of how much the tree roots had invaded. The bean plants are runty and not very productive because the tree roots are sucking up all the water and nutrients. Further down the bed you can see where I've started digging out the roots.

Bed No. 4 is where much of the winter garden was growing. There were onions, carrots, radishes, spinach, arugula, and cress. Now I'm working on transitioning it to other fall and winter crops. The far right just got planted with Brussels Sprouts and Kalettes. The green patch is arugula that volunteered after I pulled up Speedy Arugula that I had allowed to go to seed. As soon as I finish prepping the bed I'll be putting in seedlings for amaranth, broccoli, broccolini, collards, and kale. 

So you can see that even though I've not been a presence in the blogging world that I've not completely abandoned my garden. I doubt that I'll get back to gardening with the intensity that I did in years past but so long as my garden doesn't become a pantry for the rodents again I'll keep on trying to grow and harvest good things to eat.

Oh, I almost forgot to introduce the new family members. These guys joined us last October when Milo was just a few months old and Ziggy was 2.

Milo and Ziggy