Welcome to Meg’s Blog

I never tire of the garden metaphors. Asparagus season has me thinking. Watching the spears bust through the compost, growing inches by the day, they say so much in their actions. There’s no hiding the health and vigor of their roots as they begin their incessant emerging from now until first hard frost. They wear their hearts on their sleeves.

The fatter the stem, the stronger the root. That’s the way with asparagus. Within that is the caveat that female plants tend to produce slimmer stalks than male plants (I know, gender binary stereotypes maybe even the asparagus doesn’t want.) But ours is about 99% male plants by design — because they won’t drop fertile seeds and compete with the vigor of the initial planting — so we really are talking about a wide range of root health.

They shoot up and plead with me daily: Meg, are you feeding your own roots? Do I want to grow a spindly spear, or do I want to be sure to take the time and energy to restore myself so I can show up in my life and for my friends and colleagues with my tank full?

It’s pretty clear with asparagus who’s done the best job of tending to their roots, who has taken enough of their energy and invested it in themselves. It’s not quite as easy to tell with humans, generally, but what’s the point in pretending you’ve got more reserves than you actually do?

With spending more than half its life in a state of rest, asparagus really makes the most of the life it’s given. It reminds me of how easy it is to be completely explosive with our own state of being in spring and summer, bending our lives to the extended sunshine and aliveness all around us. But we don’t rest in winter like the plants. I mean, not as much as we would like. (Or wait, is that just me?)

So rest needs to be included in every growing season, too. It’s something I’m slowly learning, and maybe it’s because all my chronic pain and fatigue is building a taller wall that’s not as easy to just hop over. I am trying to accept it as a gift of hard won balance instead of a sign of weakness or failure. It’s a daily battle, but I may be coming to acceptance.

My Plea for More Asparagus Grown from Seed

As many of you know, I am a huge fan of growing asparagus from seed. I believe, and maybe I’m the only one, that asparagus is one of those things that most people can grow from seed easily, but there’s this massive misconception that you will get a faster harvest from crowns. Not true!

If done correctly, you can harvest your first yields off asparagus seedlings at about 18 months after germination. This equates to the exact same time you’d be planting one year old crowns, the ubiquitous pathway to homegrown asparagus. Saute that in some olive oil and sea salt, and make a plan for January 2023.

Our asparagus bed is largely five years old; there are a few plants that we started from saved seed in 2017 or ‘18 and planted again to replace some female plants. We are growing a male dominant hybrid, Jersey Knight. We have probably 1/3 too many plants, but an easy, early season food is nothing to underestimate and we are eating it nearly daily now and will through the end of June.

If asparagus is something you’d like to add to your garden, take the time to locate a permanent home for it and I highly recommend sowing it from seed. It takes a few weeks to break dormancy like celery, cape gooseberry, and the like, but by potting it up and then planting it really deep, you’ll have a head start on any crowns you waltz past in home improvement or garden centers.

And remember to watch your garden carefully for lessons about self care. Because these plants are most often our most fervent and open teachers in our lives. Maybe we’d even call them our best friends. Do you need permission to nourish your roots? I am here to give that to you. Go ahead, take the very best care of yourself today, and always.

For the past 2-3 years, we have had early warm ups here. They are truly wonderful after a cold and dark winter, allow my earliest cold hardy crops to go into the ground before April, hasten our first harvest which has historically also been in April, and generally felt like a real upside to climate change for those of us in the stranglehold of a cold climate.

But there are as many downsides to an early spring as there are upsides. These tradeoffs crystalize most notably in our perennial garden, namely our fruit trees, shrubs, and berries. When we get stretches of warmth coupled by zero snow cover in March and early April, it emulates what late April is (or was), and irreversibly invites the fruit trees to bloom a little too early. We had frost damage to our apple and plum trees last year, though the plums were definitely more cold hardy than the apples and fared quite well. (However, the plum curculio ended up sneaking into the fruit and ruining our harvest.)

Additionally, our strawberries have been hit by a “late frost” before May 10 over the last several years, decimating our king berries. You know them as the barely-fit-in-your-mouth strawberries you end up fighting over when the bowl or container drops at the center of the table. I yield to littler fingers and prepare to battle with a fellow adult, but maybe that’s just me. The first flowers of June bearing strawberries are the largest, and the rest are diminished in size.

It’s looking like a very king berry kind of June is on the horizon, and that will make for some very content and satisfying bowlfuls in June and July. In contrast to many seasons where we had strawberries flowering in April, our strawberries are JUST starting to flower. This means zero will be lost to frost which hopefully also means a return to our epic 170 lb harvest of 2019, which produced plenty to enjoy fresh, share, make jelly, and freeze for smoothies. We have a very big strawberry habit and we are hoping it’s a big year.

These are the intensifying challenges we face as gardeners, how to navigate growing what we love while considering the more volatile climate that we each grow alongside. We could spend our precious hours trying to protect such flowers during inclement weather, and probably if I were still gardening on our small city lot with just a few fruit trees, I may seriously consider such measures.

But gardening on the borderline “farming” scale we do makes it unrealistic, especially because it’s mostly just me doing this kind of work. So we take our king berry years as bonuses, as we won’t be covering the crops with floating row cover if late frost is expected.

On top of sheer luck, we also plan and plant perennial fruits now that are more cold hardy than we used to, focusing on zone 3 hardy plants instead of zone 4. The hardier the plants, the later they will flower — or that is our hope. We’ve added pears, apricots, honeyberries, lingonberries, and apples to our perennial food orchard in the past year, all hardier than our growing zone.

What silver lining of a late spring are you able to appreciate in your growing zone? Have you begun to evaluate your growing zone and climate change?

I keep finding myself yearning for sentimental things these days.

I’m currently wearing a few pieces of jewelry that are old and treasured. The first I stumbled upon while looking for something else. Instead, I found an even more precious something: the promise ring my then-boyfriend-now-husband and I exchanged a year before we got engaged — and right before I left to do a study abroad in Argentina my senior year of college. His promise ring slipped off his ring finger some tiring graveyard shift while he was digging in the bales of hops for his brewery job at Deschutes Brewery; it was never found and probably ended up in their water recycling plant. I’ve slipped mine underneath my wedding ring, stacking our story together for a new chapter. It felt simple yet significant, honoring our story, and I may wear them like this for the rest of my life. It just felt right.

The other treasure I’m wearing is that of my paternal grandfather. You see, I am having my favorite watch repaired, and the only other functional watch I have is my grandfather’s watch, it’s an old fashioned, battery-free wind up kind. It keeps time as well as my iPhone. There’s a lesson there.

At first I thought I was holding onto the past, these parts of my life that aren’t ever going to return. However, I realized today I am delicately and intentionally threading the years together, weaving them into my very being right now. I visualize it as an embroidery needle reaching back to pick up these important moments and people and experiences of my past and traveling through time along that very thread to carry them here, stitching their love into my present life so I can carry them close at heart.

Their visual presence honors and accepts my past, while recognizing the person I am today, and the person I am becoming still. It’s not unlike my relationship with plants.

The garden does this too, in so many ways. Each year the tapestry grows ever more intricate, with the past year’s life experiences composting and flourishing anew with each passing season. Grief melds into joy and remembrance. Arduous times may root down, delicately and humbly flower in inconspicuous ways. The garden holds our heart, our hopes, our dreams, our joy, and our deepest grief. It all grows there.

Each season I spend with a plant is imbued with the experiences of that season. I revisit them year over year like dear family, and our shared experiences entwine and become richer and more meaningful. Last year was the first year I grew sesame and the first year I lost my father. My mother-in-law loved blue and we had an incredible green darner dragonfly land on a larkspur that completely delighted her, one of the final joyful garden memories I ever shared with her before she passed. Larkspur remain a self-sowing summer flower and they honor her legacy. Spending time in my garden with my thoughts, heartaches, dreams, favorite people, and mundane moments all adds beautiful layers of continuity to my life. It’s almost like another succession within the garden.

Perhaps my life is the succession, and as I learn and grow, I see the garden and plants and space with new possibility.

I can’t wait to see what this season brings to life, as the space remains so still and quiet.

t’s back with a fire. Or maybe it never left. I am feeling so many pangs of sadness and grief, and even just watching these words materialize across my screen has my eyes welling up with big fat tears of loss. I really miss my dad these days.

This is my first spring without him. I had 47 years of his grounding presence. It was not always easy and we worked hard to find common ground between our very different belief systems. It was worth every ounce of grit and pain, because as we learned to respect each other’s differences, our relationship deepened. He was the best listener, and I miss dialing the home number that is no more knowing he’d always pick up on the second ring if he was in his basement office, smoking his pipe, listening to talk radio or classical music.

One year ago, he was fighting and losing a battle to two very aggressive cancers in a terribly frail body. It was heartbreaking, and yet even with his pain and suffering (those are my words, not his as he claimed to not be in pain until the very end), he was here with us. We were able to try to comfort him. We had time to say the words we needed to say. He clung to those months as he internally and bravely faced his mortality. We shared his hope, yet I quickly and quietly came to terms with how terminal his diagnosis was and how quickly he would slip away. Unfortunately, we had already lost another parent to a much less aggressive cancer a year earlier so I knew his was a much dire situation.

I have days where he feels so close. I wake some mornings having spent time with him at various stages of life. I scroll through my phone for old garden photos and find the many near the end last summer as I cared for him in his final hours.

I wish I could call him. He’s not here for my big events this week, like speaking live in front of hundreds of people or being able to hear my interview on Minnesota Public Radio yesterday. He doesn’t know that my book went into a second printing 3 days after it released. He also knew he wouldn’t be here for these things.

The garden has and will continue to embed these life experiences among its paths and plants. The garden is our life story. It’s definitely my life story. Many of the most important and difficult pieces of news have been received there, because, well, it’s where we live for half the year. And its in this bittersweet beauty that the garden becomes. It becomes a sacred space where life is intimately experienced. It’s where I went to aimlessly piece together life after losing a parent, and its with the bitter awareness that he won’t be here this spring or summer that I return, but this time grateful he is no longer suffering.

The uncertainty that surrounds us these days is exhausting (or is it just me?). But when I lean into the wisdom of plants and let their intrinsic rhythms guide my seasons, all is well. I am settling into this late spring with renewed optimism for a beautiful and storied garden season that has already made me appreciate her even more.

Welp, we are still in a bit of a holding pattern with our weather. It’s hard to face a season unlike any we’ve known here, fraught with increased anxiety for a path not yet forged. What do I do? Do I do what I’ve done or do I try something different? I’ve already missed my “hard and fast” March 31 transplanting date, and so mentally I am pushing back against the internal soundtrack telling me it’s all over, I missed my transplanting date and I’m a f______.

I could try to plant my brassicas out between breaks in the rain this week if I get a wild hair, but I’d probably rather be warm and toasty by the fire. It can feel like we are behind or maybe stagnant when year to year fluctuations derail a tried and true ritual. But I have started to reframe this as something much more potent — and positive.

What if the act of suspended waiting is helping us bring forth something greater this spring? Think of the amount of time deciduous trees stand tall, suspended in time. They are not stagnant, they are alive and well. They require this dormancy to thrive. Our black walnut trees, a nuisance to the garden, are our shortest-lived trees within the growing season. They leaf out last in spring and drop their leaves first in autumn. I think they may be my new favorite teacher. I for one do not dedicate enough time to rest. Rather than being a deciduous tree, I think rest needs to be more embedded into the fabric of our weeks. (To that end, I will start to take every Sunday completely offline, including posting to the Guild, a practice that will regenerate creativity that dampens with too much time spent plugged in.)

We don’t have to be all the things or do all the things to be everything. We need to work to redefine what it means to be successful in our gardens and in our lives. And softening rather than grinding is the path that’s calling to my mind, body, and soul. I hope you’ll join me in finding ways to soften so you too can grow and flourish.

And yes, I derive extreme joy in pushing the season, so will continue down this storied path I so enjoy traveling. And this year, I am soaking in what it means to delay the start. I look to the trees and the dormant life all around us, patiently waiting their time. I truly bow to their wisdom to endure half their life in suspended animation.

I am still confident the lesson of this spring is that transplanting my earliest starts a week later will not mean a delay of harvests, but rather will mean there are multiple paths to successfully and dependably harvesting food by late April here. It is potentially refining my sowing dates ever so slightly, though early sowing is as much for low tunnels as it is for me to have lush plants to tend and seedlings to thin and nosh.

Whatever the lesson about to unfold here, it will only expand possibilities for me in future seasons. This is the potency of gardening, inviting the lessons to permeate our beings and help us evaluate our entire lives. The garden grows so much more than just food, and for that I am tearfully, heart-achingly grateful.

How are you working on reframing this bumpy start to the growing season? Comment below.

I am achieving a new milestone this week: my starts, for the first time, won’t be hardened off and ready to transplant by March 31.

This is a blow to my pride, but it likely won’t amount to a delay in spring harvests. Here’s why.

When I push the early season, I am asking the plants to tolerate super erratic and often cold spells under the row cover. The temperatures are sometimes surviving temperatures for days on end — not thriving conditions. While they can make it through extended periods in the low 40s under cover, it’s far from idea growing conditions of 60-75 (for brassicas). So I am working to compost my “end of March” pride this season, knowing there’s just not been a good window of time in which to harden these seedlings off yet. I am not even going to begin the hardening off process until after this mass of cold air pushes on by us later this week.

It was 12F when I woke up this morning, too cold even for seedlings under low tunnel if I want them to do anything other than survive. Starting Saturday, I see a string of good temps for hardening off. A low of 25F with covered seedlings is totally feasible and does not worry me; it’s just we didn’t have warm enough days recently to be able to properly harden the seedlings off.

I don’t expect to transplant my seedlings under the tunnel until April 8 or 9. Given last year’s raised bed construction, that might be the timeframe in which I transplanted as well, and it worked out fine. In fact, the extra week may prove inconsequential to how early we harvest relative to past years.

Heck, this snafu in pushing my season might prove to me that waiting an extra week — delaying my earliest sowing and subsequent transplanting of starts — is another viable path to achieving bok choy in April and Tiara cabbages and kohrlabi in May. I know this to be true for my radishes. While I have radish seedlings under row cover right now that have germinated, when I sow more next week they will be met with happier temperatures and thus mature faster.

What often happens is the first and second earliest plantings end up maturing around the same time. The earliest planting is really a deeply personal celebration of all that spring offers. It’s for me to get my hands back into the earth. To witness the awe and wonder that every single seed possesses, particularly the resilience of cold season foods.

All that being said, it is really mentally challenging to continue to be in this state of limbo where so many plants would benefit from starting the hardening off process yet my high temperature today is 32F (0C), so it’s just not feasible. I am taking this extra indoor time to be sure my next rounds of succession planting — more flowers, brassicas, beets, and lettuce — is planned out so that when I do mix up my next soil block mixture, I’ll simply follow my sowing legend.

Once again, the garden is speaking to us. It’s asking for our extended patience this spring as we endure unseasonably cool temperatures. I know I need more practice in patience, how about you?

Comment below: how is your early spring is going where you grow?

Happy Spring!!!

Every year for the past five years, I’ve continued to ask the question, How early is too early to start sowing seeds directly in my soil?

And I want each and every one of you who’s reading this to start asking yourself this question and testing it in your gardens too. Because the answer that keeps revealing itself is that my season could be even earlier than I think — still — even after all my years of experimenting. This is why I love to garden. The learning is truly perennial, and novel each year. Even though I push my zones as hard as I can with as little extra resources or work (I really hate working in the cold, it wreaks havoc on my fibro joint pain and sets me back days), I continue to wonder how much earlier I could be sowing things because I keep sowing things earlier and it keeps working.

I sowed my earliest uncovered radishes, arugula, cilantro and baby bok choy on March 19, the last day of winter. I had a terrible migrane and it was all the gardening I was able to accomplish. It got me moving, outside in the fresh air, and renewed my spirit even though my body was aching. This is not the earliest I’ve direct sowed seeds, but it is the earliest I’ve direct sowed seeds uncovered. It’s a wonderful experiment and I am determined to not cover or coddle them. I want nature to show me what’s possible. The soil temperatures were reading well above 50F even deeper than an inch, which means, with a little luck, now that the dark compost-topped beds are snow free, they should continue to warm every day this week. We’ve got critical mass.

You see, four years ago I sowed seeds on March 20, the vernal equinox, and I thought I was pretty bad ass for doing that under my low tunnel. The next year it was warm early so I bumped it up to March 15 and felt utterly jubilant because there was still feet of snow around me while the soil inside the low tunnel was in the 40s. Last year was insanely warm early and I went for it on March 9, again under the protection of our low tunnel. That was just a little over a week after we covered the bed with our plastic. That just sounds ridiculous even to me.

But that’s just the thing. Seeds want to grow. And when we sow the right seeds at the right time, they will thrive.

Now is the time to sow ALL our favorite tasty greens, quick radishes, bunching onions, and heck, while we’re at it, let’s soak our peas and toss them into the ground too. I usually don’t sow my peas until April 1, another mentally rewarding early season tradition that reliably yields peas for us in plentitude by mid- to late June. I decided tonight I’ll overnight soak some peas this week, and sow them under a light row cover to give them a little head start and protection. We are dipping into the low 20s later this week, and so they will definitely appreciate a little row cover.

You see how I’m just sort of winging this year to year? I study my forecasts, take soil temperatures with our meat thermometer, and let my own curiosity and energy levels drive what I focus on. Each year is quite different, with new foods proving they are the cold hardy champions. It’s a real joy to grow alongside the seeds I tend, and I hope you are energized for a bountiful spring garden to kick your season off right.

What’s inevitable is all these foods will be unhappy when heat waves descend. And, my garden is rather bare and foodless right now, so space abounds for these quick foods. Even if my garden were smaller, and probably especially if it was, I would be implementing this strategy. We could easily carve out space for our tomatoes in May if our bok choy, cilantro and arugula was still producing, as those plants live at different heights and can cohabitate for a little while.

Like I said in my book, may the early radish win! Here’s to April Radishes.

As many of you know, 2021 was a very difficult year for me and my family. My dad was diagnosed with stage 4 head and neck cancer (two types) in December 2020. I knew it was a death sentence; he was determined to fight it. I knew in my heart that fighting it would result in the same poor quality of life as not fighting it. I hate that he suffered, though he denied he was ever in pain until his final weeks, but respect his decision to want to beat the sh*t out of cancer. He left us six months after he started treatment. It was a whirlwind of care and the daughters are just starting to move forward with our lives after the trauma.

I was with him when I turned my book in on Feb. 1, 2021 to my editor. I was still helping care for him and take him to treatment 2 weeks later when my editor wrote back and told me I had written “a magnificent book”, one he believed was “destined to become a classic”. I read this aloud to my dad in the kitchen, the man who made it almost 83 years without owning an email address, computer, or cell phone. This was an intermediary space, some of the rare daily moments when he was on his feet, navigating the commute between the bathroom and the couch. He tipped his head back, rolled his eyes, and gave a joyful, exasperated “whoa!”. I don’t live for my parents’ pride and acknowledgment, but by that time I knew he’d probably be gone before it came out.

Compounding the trauma is to understand that we had already lost part of our mother years earlier. She has memory loss, and by the time he fell terminally ill she was much farther along her dementia journey than we had realized; Dad was adept at keeping secrets. He protected her from us, which in turn allowed him to let her live as her independent self as long as possible. In hindsight it was both brave and reckless, and yet also loving and kind.

Today, the book comes out, and I don’t really have parents to celebrate it with. For some reason, this feels significant, arriving at this massive lifetime milestone without parents to cheer me on. It feels a little lonely, I’m not gonna sugar coat it.

I was with my parents when this book concept germinated, on the same property where they honeymooned, where my dad’s mom spent time, and where many wonderful and strong female ancestors frequented. It was an auspicious place for the book idea to take form, and I always have that space and the fact that my dad and mom were among the first people to hear me think through this idea out loud. It felt like an intergenerational blessing that the thesis for this book came to me in this location.

And I’ll never forget it. At that time I had a book deal in hand from a smaller publisher, one destined to publish in February 2021 — a full 13 months sooner than today. And, at that time, I was invited to present book ideas to Timber Press, which was the idea for a book about succession gardening that became Plant Grow Harvest Repeat (my initial book title was Succession Gardening, but the powers that be struck that down and I then I came up with the current title). I shared that their books are superior in quality and the tradeoff is that the process was a full year longer. My dad did that same eye roll and laugh, but this time it was, “2022?! I may not be around by then.” It was as if he knew the cancer was brewing inside him.

So while this is a massive celebration, tears are definitely part of the day. Tears of joy, tears of sadness. Because, the biggest secret I’ve come to learn over the past two years is that as children we are permitted to live wholly in joy or despair, but as we grow and mature we realize that every moment is an amalgamation of all the senses and emotions.

My focus for 2022 is to live as simple a life as possible, both in and out of the garden. Perhaps that sounds ambitious and misplaced given my first book publishes in March and I’ve got other projects in the works, but I do believe that I can mute the noise that tends to distract me and create negative tension in my daily life. I look forward to sharing my journey with you as I strive to live a more balanced life.

This yearning has also led me to really try to grow what we know this year. To take inventory this winter of our root cellars and refine our growing space to continue to dial in the seasonal needs of our family of four. It’s the third week of January and we are still enjoying Brussels sprouts, Chinese cabbage, red cabbage, carrots, daikon, radishes, kohlrabi, turnips, beets, potatoes, onions, garlic, winter squash, popcorn, cornmeal, dry beans, sesame seeds, & ginger — plus canned tomatoes, dill pickles, roasted & frozen peppers and eggplants, and more. We are supplementing our vegetables a bit this time of year, but minimally, trying our best to build menu plans around the food we have stored from our fall harvests. It’s a fun and rewarding exercise in culinary creativity and living in the moment.

Our goals are to continue to grow what we know. I am not growing new-to-us vegetables this year, with one minor exception: red-veined sorrel. I’ll tuck this into our herb garden and see if it will perennialize for us.

We want to grow more flour corn for nixtamalizing and making our own tortillas. I’ve ordered seed from Native Seed Search to grow here. Being latitude-sensitive with seed hailing from much farther south, I am cautiously optimistic it will yield well for us and I can save seed and keep growing it in our northern garden. I am looking forward to this slow food and growing exercise.

One of the anchors of the summer garden and winter menu is tomatoes. Currently, the tomato garden plans are in flux, but we may plant an overall smaller garden. I think we had 28 tomato plants last year — about half were slicers or cherry tomatoes. I know tomatoes are everything to so many, but I’d rather have more beans for more vegetarian meals come winter. Because winter is long and I want to feed us for as long as possible.

I am resisting the urge to allocate space for flashy Instagram photos. Instead, we are going to increase the number of indeterminate paste tomatoes for saucing as they were the big winner last summer of our tomato garden. More on tomatoes in a separate post very soon!

We are going to drop peanuts for 2022 as the rodents destroyed any hopes of even a small harvest — they beat us to the harvest, and I’m not even sure they were mature when they started digging for them. We had a good few years’ harvesting, but being it was an 80 square foot area, I will return that square footage to more reliable foods like dry beans.

We are bringing tomatillos back into the garden. I’ve had terrible luck with them the past few years and took 2021 off them completely. But this winter we have been devouring salsa verde and so, naturally, it makes me want to attempt to can enough salsa for the year. I ordered a larger, hybrid variety called Super Verde from Johnny’s Seeds. I’m looking forward to hopefully turning a corner with this elusive tomato cousin turns into a vegetal jungle in our garden by August. Let’s hope for fruit this summer.

I also will be trialing more direct seeding this summer as I did the past few years to continue to question the need for indoor sowing my fall crops. If I can successfully transition more of our garden to direct-seeding, it will reduce our carbon footprint all around. I am truly curious to see what else besides Chinese cabbage and kohlrabi can succeed direct sown in mid to late summer here. I’ll keep you posted for sure.

Lastly, we need to make some changes to our new-to-us irrigation. Our landscaper’s irrigation crew used some very common boxes for the turnoff valves for each bed. What these are in reality are many little mouse hotels. I found corn stockpiled in one and a bed of gomphrena in another. Our cat has chased several field mice into these plastic burrows before the snow buried the rascals safely under their winter blanket. So we will be taking the time and probably hiring someone to help eliminate all of those boxes in our 15 or so raised beds.

A new year is finally upon us. I am not one to make massive resolutions, but I deeply appreciate this opportunity to leave behind in 2021 that which didn’t serve our garden and move into 2022 with even more clarity.

Last year was tumultuous all around. Globally we continue to live through historic times, and the stress and tension of everyday life are downright exhausting. The garden is more important than ever. It grounds me in every way. While I enjoy these quiet weeks of subzero temperatures by the wood stove, not a day goes by that I don’t dream of hot and sticky summer days lazing around the garden endlessly admiring all that flourishes. Lately, I’ve been mentally wandering the 2021 summer garden and wanted to jot down the highs and lows that last year brought to the garden.

What 2021 Taught Us

Some square footage in 2021 yielded very little food, including our peanuts that were ravaged by rodents well before maturity, despite our very effective barn cat.

We typically allocate 4’x12’ for peanuts, so that was a large bed that yielded, well, not even peanuts. As much I LOVE to grow them for both their educational opportunity and the thrill of having them in the garden, I will plant a markedly smaller peanut garden in 2022. I want to minimize what has proven to be a two-year trend of rodents >> humans.

Okra was a novel vegetable for us last year. I chose an heirloom variety that was visually stunning. I confess, we only ate it a few times — roasted and raw. I preferred it raw. We did donate veggies including okra several times, but as it’s not in our wheelhouse of knowledge, the fast and familiar foods always seemed to win out come dinnertime.

I managed to harvest and save seeds and have used some dried pods in an everlasting bouquet. It was more of a visual garden anchor and really fun experiment to observe how it grew from seed. It contributed vertical interest and structure more than anything. It grew well started indoors in 3” newspaper pots and transplanted into the garden right before a June heatwave — well, it did protest during the heatwave but recovered quickly once the temperatures moderated.

One of my favorite unusual subtropical fruits to grow underwhelmed yet again. Despite loving their superior flavor over their cousins, ground cherries, we consumed less than a dozen cape gooseberries from a 4’x6’ space. Twenty-five square feet for a few fruits here and there. It was a grossly underproductive use of space. However, I don’t know if I can go more than a year without their tropical punch. Sometimes space allocated for an occasional pop of wow must be measured with a different kind of productivity. It isn’t always about volume. This delicacy is about a true food experience, and I am certain I won’t be able to resist the urge to sow them very soon (they take extra long to germinate and establish). They also set me up for a happy population of three-lined potato beetles in June through August — a mixed blessing of beetle picking which means quiet and contemplative garden time.

Relatedly, I abandoned our summer carrot bed due to my Dad’s terminal illness and decision to go on hospice; upon returning after his death I was swallowed by tomato harvesting and processing and didn’t get around to thinning them out as well as I’d have if I was around. I am thus, hopeful, for a simpler 2022 without the tight sandwich generation squeeze.

Some years are modest, and our carrot harvest has seen stronger years to be sure. Hoping next summer and fall I will be able to be present for all the minor yet significant garden tending like thinning the fall carrots to ensure a more robust stash for winter consumption.

Compounding the underwhelming carrot bed, we also had very spotty germination of a pelleted variety, Dolvica, which typically germinated and grows really well for us. Carrots are a winter staple and it would be amazing to still have some in storage come April. But I’m not getting my hopes up — our harvest this past fall was 1/3 smaller — at 50-something pounds — than fall of 2020, which yielded around 75 pounds. Last winter we had carrots all the way until May. It was awesome!

We had a very underwhelming pepper year too. I am not sure what the cause was but a few top culprits are too much irrigation, too rich soil (too high in nitrogen), or too warm overnight temperatures that prevented fruit set. Most plants only had one fruit set, and some had less than a handful of peppers. I am hoping as the microbial life establishes, the pepper garden will be more fruitful, as soon as this summer.

Finally, another big downer was the fungal pressure our cucurbits continue to endure. I believe we have an anthracnose fungal disease in our soil or on our cucumber and melon trellises. All varieties were hit with the bullseye on the leaves by late July and I pulled all of them out in mid-August. We only put up one batch of dill pickles, but luckily have some leftover from 2020. I am still pondering our best approach for 2022, including taking a few years off to try to minimize spores in the garden.

What Worked Well

On the plus size of 2021, there are many. First and foremost, I think our tomato garden was large enough. In particular, I think we grew enough paste tomatoes. We had 12 determinate paste tomatoes (Italian Roma, Plum Perfect, and Paisano) and 7 indeterminate paste tomatoes (Inciardi Red, Opalka, Speckled Roman, and Ukrainian Purple). We will be finalizing our tomato grow list soon. We enjoyed the heftiness and meatiness of the indeterminate varieties but the productivity of the determinates is unmatched. We will likely grow a mix of the two again this year and hope for 50-60 quarts of roasted and canned tomatoes again — plus plenty of pounds of ketchup too! Hopefully this summer I’ll get back to salsa as well, both red and salsa verde.

We allocated more square footage than ever to potatoes and grew five varieties. Some were more productive than others, but as with the carrot debacle, Colorado potato beetles made home in the potato beds while I was busy caring for my dying father. I did my best upon returning to get a handle on the situation, but the voracious foragers reduced the productivity below-ground and set us up for several years of extra vigilance of our nightshades (they will also feed on eggplants that are also in the same plant family). Despite this minor setback, because we allocated more space, we harvested over 150 pounds of potatoes, our largest harvest to date. We are adding 3 more varieties to the garden this year, two are Russet-type potatoes and one late-season variety hailing from France. We will repurpose some of our peanut and okra square footage to potatoes this summer.

Sesame was by far my favorite new seed/flower we grew in 2021, and over the past few years. Sesame resembles foxglove with its tubular flowers that are set on 2-3’ spikes. We continue to enjoy a small amount of toasted sesame seeds as a topping for various meals. The flavor is unparalleled — its intensity and nutty flavor is so satisfying and rich. The power of homegrown food at its best. Everyone should try growing sesame! (I bought my seeds from fellow northern gardeners/seed company Fruition Seed.)

Sweet potatoes made a comeback to the garden this year, and the harvest was moderate. I love the ease of growing sweet potatoes as well as the resilience of the vines against pest pressure. Japanese beetles did forage slightly on the foliage but not as devastating as they do edamame and pole beans. I am not sure if we will grow them again in 2022, or take another few years off, but they are a food I enjoy growing as space allows. We are still enjoying our sweet potato harvest.

Watermelon was a hit this summer. We grew an heirloom variety that weighed in at 26 pounds. They were terribly difficult to determine when they were ripe, as heirlooms don’t tend to follow the dried tendril and pale yellow bottom signals that modern hybrids display when mature. It took 2 underripe ones to finally get it right. We enjoyed two very large watermelons and I’ve ordered a few hybrid watermelon varieties to trial for 2022. Because it is less susceptible to disease than musk melons, it may eclipse cantaloupes as our late summer annual fruit until we can get the cucurbit anthracnose under control.

Finally, a highlight of the season was our robust dry bean harvest. We harvested somewhere between 12-18 pounds of dry beans. We’ve been enjoying them weekly since late fall and hope to have them on the menu weekly until June sometime until peas and green beans are back in season. This is in large part due to our garden addition that provided ample space to dedicate to shelf-stable crops like dry beans. I find these types of garden adventures the most rewarding and look forward to more exploration with dry beans in the coming years. My dream is to grow enough beans for at least two meals a week year-round. I’m not sure how much space that will be, but growing highly productive beans is certainly one of the best routes to achieve that, and these Borlotti pole beans are highly productive.

The beauty of annual gardens is the opportunity to try new things as well as experience a variety of outcomes with the same seeds and varying environmental conditions. I love growing the same things every year knowing the results will never be quite the same. Something will fail, other things will soar. That’s the alluring beauty of the garden; no matter how experienced you are, you enter each growing season knowing myriad lessons await your curious heart.

It has been quite a calendar year for me. And it has been a memorable garden year too, so far.

With my time split between our home, family, and garden and tending my terminally-ill father who lived 1,300 miles away, I was absent more than ever this year. While I was gone, my garden came down with its own illnesses from lack of attention.

I am realizing so much about being present in my garden this year. I’ve been gone for weeks at a time from the seed starting weeks of February and March all the way through until late July during what is usually my absolute favorite time of the season. It has been very difficult for my and the garden’s well-being. Seedlings had not been tended to my standards, and legginess ensued. Outdoors, pests and disease managed to slip right in under the radar and have slowly but surely gotten the upper hand in more than one crop.

Without my daily, watchful eye, damaging insects made a quick home of our food garden. Without my hourly wandering patrols, eggs were laid and left for good, and ALL the larvae hatched. While I was tending a different kind of garden, the end of my father’s life, spores were spreading among our cucurbits and tomatoes.

After my first summer trip home to care for him, I noticed hints of cucumber disease, an unfortunately familiar sight despite crop rotating annually. After our short trip away the following week, we came back to more disease spreading, this time among our tomatoes. And when I got back from the final and hardest trip of my life, I returned home to potato plants decimated by a large and surely happy population of Colorado Potato Beetles. Meanwhile, our once lush melon plants were nearly dead from disease pressure.

Determinate tomatoes both prevailed amid disease pressure by mid-August. We harvested ample to process, and enough to create holiday novelties too.

This was our year to not fret over disease, because it was not our year for a well-tended garden. It was our year to see what a not-so-well tended garden can produce on the hottest and driest year.

It was a stark reminder that disease must be fretted over. I’ve never considered gardening something we check in on a few times a month, but seeing just how quickly disease progressed and plants deteriorated really cemented further for me the “no vacations in summer” house rule we generally keep. And seeing how fast plants took off and roamed well beyond their allocated space was another benign eyesore I spent some days trying to wrangle upon my return.

Some disease is difficult to manage, but not a complete wash. We kept our cucumbers until late August, and had a hefty supply of cukes that lasted until early September. Our tomatoes have been slowly defoliated by Septoria Leaf Spot, but their productivity was already well on its way; we canned tomatoes a few times a week and felt very homestead-y. There are potatoes to harvest, though yields will be much reduced due to all the defoliation and premature senescence.

Ignoring minor defoliation and not treating at all resulted in the Chinese cabbage recovering quickly, seen here with healthy inner leaves.

Despite the disease, the garden carries on. Some diseases we will be managing for a few years. I am certain the Colorado potato beetle we’ve been so fortunate to live without for years have now established a pretty strong population in our garden — and that will take a few years to find a homeostasis (aka, I hope to fully eradicate them again). We are continuing to hand pick them daily, but I have a suspicion we are not getting them all.

You know the Colorado potato beetles are at home in your garden when they’ve casually been snuggling with your tomatoes.

Crop rotation is one of the many things we will do next year — and we have been doing for our tomatoes. The tomato disease has followed our plants around for what is now the third year, and this is why I strongly believe it was our trellises that harbored the spores overwinter, thus inviting this defoliating disease to spread this summer yet again.

Thanks to the disease pressure, we are taking a serious look at how we clean our trellises this fall. It turns out we never have cleaned off our trellises — ooops! — and I know at least for the cucurbit anthracnose and the tomato septoria leaf spot, both of those can overwinter on trellis material, wood or metal. So some serious garden hygiene is on our fall garden tasks list.

Sometimes you have to lose things to understand the whole picture. Letting things go can often invite reflection that is required to grow and learn in new ways. I appreciate everything the ongoing hardship has taught me about resilience and patience — and most of all, paying attention to what is right in front of you every single day.