Gardening lessons

We learned a lot about raising vegetables in our little back-yard garden plot this summer. We'll do many things differently next year.

This little handful of tomatoes is pretty much all we got out of a jungle of tomato plants that took over a whole bed. One thing this summer taught me is how not to grow tomatoes. Photo by John Denniston.

Poking through the enclosure into the lane, another little bunch is still trying to ripen in October. I don't think they'll make it; the vines are already shrivelling. Photo by John Denniston.

 It was an experiment we undertook this Covid spring -- partly for entertainment, and partly due to vague rumours that the pandemic could threaten the food supply. If things got really, really bad, could we grow vegetables in a garden so shady that moss and ferns are the happiest plants there?

The results are in now, and the answer is that we’d survive just fine if we could live on kale, Swiss chard, bok choy and rocket. All those cool-weather, shade-happy vegetables were what was available when I did my panic buying in March; I didn’t know it at the time, but they were exactly what the gardening gurus would have recommended for our garden. Other, more marginal, possibilities failed. The bush beans put out handsome leaves until the moths ate holes in them, but actual pods were scarce. The peas, supposedly of a type that would support each other if planted close together, quickly flopped over, taking their neighbours with them and disintegrating in the dirt. So there were no peas, either.

The veggies that flourished -- rocket, Swiss chard, kale.

Predictably, the worst failures were with heat-and-sun-intensive plants, which we planted against any sensible advice. The basil got smaller every day until it vanished altogether. The tomatoes fooled us by bursting into a jungle of greenery that took over an entire garden bed and climbed 10 feet into the laurel bushes behind. But blossoms were long in appearing, and summer was on the wane before we got any hints of actual fruit. And then the rains came, turning the vines into a fuzzy greying brown and some of the fruit black. Turns out that tomatoes actually do need to be pinched and pruned to produce fruit (I held back, not wanting to discourage their exuberant growth) and they do need weeks of intense sunshine to become sweet and tasty. We gave them the best spot we had, but it wasn’t enough; that whole green tangle of tomato vines produced only a handful of pallid-tasting fruit.

The tomato jungle to the left. This plot originally also had peas, rocket, bok choy and basil, but everything succumbed to the monster tomatoes and disappeared.

I didn't plant any tomatoes in the plot closest to the lane, but suddenly, there they were, growing and heading through the lattice for the road (and the sunshine.)  I assume tomato seeds left in the bed's compost germinated and took off. Tomatoes are a lot tougher than I thought. 

We had fun with our gardening experiment, and our successes reminded us of the vast flavour chasm between home-grown greens and store-bought ones. But our little effort at defying the gardening gods has returned us to reality. Vegetables touted as flourishing in shade and cool weather do just that. And sun-lovers won’t thrive in the shade because of wishful thinking. Nature has its rules. Which also seems, somehow, a good lesson for Covid times.

The failure of the tomatoes has me wondering about the future of the strawberry bed I planted so hopefully in the spring. I took all the buds off this year, but when they bloom again next year, will shade-grown strawberries have any flavour?

Once you start veggie-gardening yourself, you begin noticing other people's efforts. John and I came across some wonderful beds on a boulevard during a walk one day in the summer. The kale in this one beat mine hands down. Photo by John Denniston.

Chard and other greens to die for. Photo by John Denniston.

Whoever was responsible for these was thinking not just of vegetables, but of adding beauty to the street. The beds are unusual, made of grey blocks instead of boards, and surrounded by grasses. Photo by John Denniston.