Cait's Garden

This was a shot of my vegetable garden from about two months ago when everything was full of promise. Let’s focus on that shot, because the current one isn’t as pretty. For the fifth year in a row, I have proven a mostly unsuccessful vegetable gardener. I don’t know how the farmers in Illinois ever grow a crop with our bizarre weather.  My one success this year was preventing early blight on my tomatoes. I think it was the regular application of liquid copper fungicide. These are the tallest tomato plants I’ve every had…and the leaves have stayed green, too! I’ve had one great tomato harvest and now am hoping for another good crop of tomatoes to prove that I really was successful at growing them this year.

To me, as long as I have a good tomato crop, I count myself lucky. There is no substitute for a home-grown tomato. Fortunately, there ARE substitutes at the store for my garden fails, like cucumbers and pumpkins. I learned that you can’t get cucumbers or pumpkins unless the bees do a good job fertilizing those pretty yellow flowers. Blame the world-wide bee blight, but my flowers did not turn into pumpkins or cucumbers. And then last week the blight set it anyway and turned all the green leaves to brown-spotted horrors. The vines have been excised. Garden fail. On a related note, the lettuce turned out bitter this year (won’t be trying that again) and the cilantro was pickable for only a heartbeat. Barely worth planting. Peppers also give me trouble. The bell kind anyway. So far, I have had one excellent pepper from each plant. Just the one pepper. Can’t explain why exactly.

The pole beans are interesting looking. A pretty green wall. The bean yield has been sparse, but at least they are still alive and producing. Therefore, they make the cut. What cut? The cut of the crops I’ll grow from now on. I am done with cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, lettuce, and most herbs. Next year, I am only growing tomatoes, jalapenos, and bell peppers (despite their sparse yield), plus another go at the pole beans. I have had enough of struggling to grow anything else. As with my flower garden, I’ve learned what is hardy and thrives. Half the job of being a good gardener is knowing when to cut your losses and change plans.