The Revenge of Gardening Revisited

Way back in June, I told you about my new adventures in gardening — last year we tried vegetables, this year we decided to add flowers. Here’s how it went…

Last year, our yard was 1/6 vegetables and, ahem, 5/6 weeds. This year we finally sprang for landscaping — nothing fancy, just grass and three plots, one for vegetables (about the same size as last year’s) and two for decorative vegetation. Having grass instead of weeds made the yard look fabulous even before we started planting stuff.

Then we populated our vegetable garden and flower beds, and sat back to see what would grow.

One of my favourite things about gardening is watching things happen. Some plants thrive, others kind of stall, a few die outright (or is that just me?). Flowers turn into tomatoes and peppers. Shrubs go dormant for a while and then start blooming again. There’s always something new to see, and that’s just darn cool.

Last year, our tomatoes and bell peppers didn’t do great, but we got carrots and a ton of zucchini.

This year, our zucchini didn’t do great and our carrots never sprouted at all, but our tomatoes grew like crazy, as did the bell peppers, hot banana peppers, chili peppers (note to self: plant fewer peppers next year!), acorn squash, and most of the herbs. And we got enough basil to make several batches of delicious pesto sauce.

Last year, squirrels ate some of our tomatoes but didn’t touch the zucchini. This year, they discovered the zucchini as well.

And on it goes.

On the flower side, we yanked out some old rosebushes that only bloomed for a few weeks out of the year (not without a certain amount of guilt — I’m sure this home’s former inhabitant loved them) and replaced them with yellow roses that bloomed for weeks, went dormant for a while, then started up again.

We planted hydrangeas in memory of my grandmother, a Japanese maple because I love them, snapdragons because I was fascinated by them as a child, hostas and ferns because they’re easy, rose of sharon and delphiniums because they’re glorious. The hydrangeas and snapdragons and rose of sharon have been most successful…this year, but who knows what will happen next year?

We planted raspberries from a friend and some kind of mystery orange flower from our next-door neighbour, both of which started to spread enthusiastically. Next year the raspberries and the orange flowers will be duking it out for supremacy.

It’s been a fascinating season, and it’s not over yet. The vegetables are still going, the acorn squash are ripening, and it’s time to plant bulbs for the spring…

Here’s to next year’s garden!