Plea from a plant assassin

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When I decided this spring to start blogging periodically about my summer garden, it was intended to be a catalog of triumphs: Here’s something great I cooked with something great I grew. That’s not quite the way it worked out in real life. It’s not that my vegetable garden turned into a total disaster, but pretty close. Let’s just say that I’m sure glad there are so many farmers markets around.

Of the more than a dozen pole beans seeds I planted, only a half-dozen actually germinated and only three (3!) plants survived to any kind of maturity. If I’m very, very lucky, my summer harvest might be enough for a garnish. I planted three shishito peppers, and I honestly don’t have any idea where they went. My eggplants gave off about one fruit each before they decided to take the rest of the summer off.

I did get a good harvest of zucchini for a couple of weeks — and then mildew hit. One day I noticed some white powder on some of the leaves, three or four days later almost every leaf on every plant had turned to brown paper. I stripped all of those away and the plants again look healthy, but in some kind of weird zucchini trauma, in the two weeks since they have thrown off only male flowers (these I chopped up and put in a frittata). The same mildew has now hit my one melon, which nonetheless continues to send out runners that creep through the garden like some weird diseased beast.

The only thing that seems to be thriving is my tomatoes. But even there I miscalculated by deciding to stake them rather than putting them in cages. Stakes seemed so much more … aesthetic … but the result is plants running amok. Even after stripping out runners and re-tying the main stalks, that bed looks like a jungle. Next year it’s all metal restraints, all the way. Even worse, rather than planting an assortment of types — a cherry, a paste, a slicer, a beefsteak — I planted just slicers and beefsteaks. I never thought I’d say this, but you can only eat so many tomato salads in one summer.

I’m not sure exactly where I went wrong with my garden, but it’s a pretty fair guess that it has something to do with neglect. I’m afraid that when it comes to gardening, I’m kind of a furniture arranger — I put a lot of thought into getting the right pieces and putting them in the right place, then I expect them to get by on their own with only an occasional dusting, or in this case automatic watering from a drip system.

Obviously this hasn’t worked. So before I plant my cool-weather crops, I’m going to get serious and try to learn something about gardening. I’m open to suggestions. I’m serious. Stop me before I kill again.

-- Russ Parsons