7 Lessons from the Garden
What I have learned about life gardening this year: 1. Some things take a lot longer than you think; be patient. Other things happen so quickly they’ll surprise you; be ready. We planted radishes for the first time this spring. They were ready to harvest within a month, and went to flower (meaning no good for eating) just a few short weeks after that. Conversely, we waited and waited for last year’s snapdragons and this year’s wildflower seed mix. After we’d given up, both kinds of flowers emerged and were blooming by mid-June. 2. Novelty is always more exciting, but reliability is invaluable. Every year we try a few new vegetables. This year: parsnips (very few came up), beets (yum), red onions (they stopped growing while still small), snap peas (double yum), and cucumber (it died in the summer drought). Every year we also fall back on our favourites: three sizes of tomatoes, hot peppers, herbs. (And every year we keep hoping for better luck with the carrots and sweet peppers.) 3. Some things just aren’t meant to be. We’ve tried growing bell peppers several times. What we end up with are stunted, squashed bells that don’t ripen past green. (Climate? Nutrients? Dunno.) We do have luck growing hot peppers, but everything we’ve planted turns out to be VERY hot and I can’t handle more than a sliver of it. This year we bought a sweet banana pepper plant and I was excited. Turns out? Either it was wrongly labelled or…