Lessons I Learned from My First Veggie Garden
As I said in an earlier post, I decided to start a veggie garden this summer. I’ve been calling it the doomsday garden, though the decision to plant it was really made well before the COVID-19 crisis. I’ve been wanting to start a garden for a few years now, and owning my own home finally afforded me the opportunity — a fortunate coincidence, since there hasn’t been a whole lot else to do this summer.
There have been plenty of ups and downs throughout the growing season, but I’d say it’s been more success than catastrophe. The best part has been eating my harvest. I plant the veggies, I grow them, I collect them, I clean them, I cook them, and I eat them — I know exactly what I spray on them and what they’ve been exposed to. There’s just no other way to say that for certain without growing your own food. It also just feels different on an emotional level to be cooking with ingredients you’re so invested in — it gives you something to be proud of every time you whip up a meal. I’ve grown herbs for years, but a pinch of thyme from a pot just isn’t the same as a whole meal that I grew myself.
On the flip side, not everything has gone as expected, and I’ve learned a few lessons from the school of hard knocks over the summer. I could definitely have stood to do a little more online research than I did before I got started, but I doubt that any amount of reading would have imparted these lessons better than learning them on the fly. Sometimes, no amount of research can make up for good, old-fashioned personal experience. Here’s a few things I’ve picked up from my very first veggie plot.
Plan Through the Winter
I did a little bit of planning over the winter of 2019/2020. In late January, I started buying and chilling seeds. In February, I germinated those seeds and planted them all, first in egg cartons and then in red solo cups (a cheaper option than pots). However, though I had some idea of where I would put my veggie garden (the only sunny spot in my whole yard), I didn’t really think much about what I needed to do to the spot until it was time to plant dozens of seedlings.
Needless to say, this was a big mistake. Soil needs to be tilled, aerated, fertilized, and — most importantly — cleared of weeds and grass. I didn’t do any of this until I was ready to stick my seedlings and store-bought starter plants in the ground. I should have laid a weighted tarp down in the spot for a couple of months to kill all the grass and weeds in my garden area before planting. I should have had a step-by-step plan for tilling and fertilizing my garden. But I didn’t. I tilled, removed the first few inches of clay, replaced it with gardening soil, and just winged it — and I spent the whole growing season pulling weed after weed because of it. I could have saved myself a whole summer of battling stubborn, disease-ridden invaders if I’d put a little more work in on the front end.
Plant What You Eat
When I was in the process of choosing fruits and vegetables to put in my garden, I picked what my spouse and I buy from the grocery store for the most part: bell peppers, jalapeños, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and okra. We eat those by the metric ton. But aside from these grocery list staples, I also picked a couple of things I’d never tried. Walking through the nursery in early March, my eyes suddenly fell on a little Shishito pepper plant with a picture of a pretty, cherry-red pepper, and I thought, “hey, I’ve never had Shishito peppers before. Maybe I’ll give ’em a shot.” I should have given them a shot at a restaurant or the grocery store because I stuck a plant in the ground, picked my first pepper a few weeks later, and realized I don’t really like them. They’re not hot like jalapeños; they’re not juicy like bell peppers; they’re just kind of there. I’ve been putting them in salads, soups, and other dishes that mask their taste so they don’t go to waste, but I should’ve just tried the pepper first because I wouldn’t have planted it if I had. Bottom line: don’t plant something just because the picture on the pot looks cute.
In the same vein, don’t just plant what you’re going to consume, plant the amount you’re going to consume. My spouse and I eat a few cucumbers a week, but I planted six cucumber vines. Anyone who knows anything about cucumbers can guess what came next. Within a few weeks, the vines had matured, climbed six feet up their trellis, and started pumping out dozens of cucumbers a week. Pretty soon, we had the darned things running out our ears. I was giving away gallon bags of them because I didn’t have any more space to store them. I started pureeing them and freezing them to use in my homemade Tzatziki, but even that didn’t get rid of enough. I didn’t want to waste them, but I also didn’t have anything to do with so many. By the time the vines got sick and I had to cut them down, I was almost glad to see them go. Yet again, I could have saved myself the trouble by doing a little more research and knowing just how productive that kind of plant is before I planted it. Next time, I’ll only do two vines.
Plant Easy Crops Your First Year
I didn’t want to let my inexperience frustrate and overwhelm me too much, so I did some research and planted what I thought would be easy, low-maintenance crops. For the most part, I was right on the money. My favorite of all the crops I planted has been the okra. This tough plant has stood up to everything the Texas growing season has to throw at it — from pests to viruses to floods to excessive heat to violent wind storms — and still kept putting out just enough for me to fry one to two big pans a week without having a bunch of excess. I never had to do anything to it. I just stuck it in the ground and let it go. Aside from having to stake or cage them, the tomatoes and peppers have also proven to be fairly low maintenance.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the onions and the collards. The collards were my mistake, as I thought I could plant them in the spring and they’d be established enough to weather the heat even though they’re a winter plant. They’re making it alright, but only because I’ve mulched them and watered them and shaded them and sprayed them for the caterpillars that were skeletonizing multiple leaves a day. They’ve been a constant struggle all summer — though they’ve taught me a lot about different gardening techniques like shade cloths and organic insect management. I’ve gotten a couple of good meals out of them, but it’s hardly been worth the effort. With the onions, I researched what to do with the bulbs and followed the instructions about watering, spacing, etc. However, for some reason the bulbs just didn’t get big, no matter what I did. I’m going to try again, but I’m guessing it’s going to take me a few seasons to get it right. I didn’t know how finicky onions can be and that the bulbs often just don’t gain girth for no apparent reason. If I could do it all over again, I’d probably avoid planting the fussier, higher maintenance veggies until I developed more knowledge and skill.
Watch Out for Plant Viruses
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m about sick of the word “virus.” It’s on the TV. It’s online. It’s on the door of every store and restaurant you go to. It’s just everywhere. Unfortunately, one of the things that didn’t really occur to me is that plants get viruses too. I knew plant viruses exist in the same kind of sense that I knew pangolins exist — they’re out there, but before 2020, I’d never seen one or had to worry about its effect on my life.
My cucumbers were the first victims of this ignorance. They got cucumber mosaic virus, a common ailment that is impossible to get rid of once its contracted. It is often carried by weeds or pest insects, but it can also live in the soil as well. Since I failed to thoroughly kill the weeds in my garden and avoided spraying insecticides if at all possible, there’s no real way to determine how they got the virus except to say they picked it up at some point. A more experienced gardener would have known better than to pick up whatever variety was just laying around at Lowes. A more experienced gardener would have gone for virus-resistant strains of such a vulnerable, disease-susceptible plant like a cucumber. But little old me thought whatever variety she found would be just fine. At first, the cucumbers produced an insane amount of really good fruit, but after a couple months, they started looking a little icky. The leaves got mottled, turned yellow, and curled under, and the fruit grew warty and deformed. Eventually, the vines began to die down to the root. Once I figured out what was going on, I finished off the cucumbers and removed all of them right away to prevent more viral spread.
Too late. I think my okra got it too, since mosaic virus infects a wide variety of plants, and my okra began to show the same symptoms as the cucumber. Fortunately, aside from a couple of funky pods and a few curled over leaves, my okra strains have (through no fault of my own) proven perfectly capable of powering through infection. They didn’t crumble at the first sign of trouble like the cucumbers; they continued growing and producing as if nothing happened.
Fortunately, the okra was the only other plant affected. I think I managed to remove the cucumbers before the mosaic virus infected my peppers and tomatoes, but next year, I am not planting any variety that isn’t known to be infection-resistant. It isn’t fun to plant fruits and veggies, tend them as they mature, only to watch them wither and die after a few weeks of production.
Plant in the Goldilocks Zone
There’s a lot of competing information out there on spacing. Some people say plant far apart so you can access plants to harvest their yields and clear weeds. Some people say plant close together because the plants will shade their own roots and choke weeds themselves. Some people say spacing like that allows mold to grow because air cannot circulate between plants. Some say spacing too far apart results in lower yields because plants aren’t motivated to compete with each other. Some say spacing close together results in lower yields because resource distribution is tighter.
With all this contradictory info out there, I basically had to try to figure it out for myself. Some things I got right — my okra is spaced perfectly, not too far apart, not too close together; it’s just right. Unfortunately, some things I got really wrong as well. My tomatoes are a tangled mess because I didn’t realize how much they’d spread out as they grew. It hasn’t really affected their yields or their health (yet), but it’s definitely affected my ability to get to the fruit. I also think I planted my peppers too far apart. They don’t have any shade on their roots, and they’ve had a constant weed problem between every single one of them, whereas the tomatoes have choked all the weeds around them to death. Ultimately, I think the best thing to do is to research the spacing requirements of each individual plant, but at the same time keep in mind that those requirements can’t possibly account for the plants’ specific situations, and you might have to move them around as they grow.
Animals WILL Come for Your Veggies — Even If You Have a Fence
Some things just can’t be planned for. Since my spouse and I have a standard six-foot privacy fence, I wasn’t too worried about rabbits or deer or the like. Unfortunately, what I didn’t plan for was the fact that porcupines live in rural western Texas. Apparently my neighborhood outside Austin is just rural enough and just west enough to have a few come sniffing around. Porcupines are natural climbers, but unluckily for the poor sap after my onions, they’re not good enough climbers to not get stuck at the top of a privacy fence. Never did I ever think I would be dealing with getting a giant-ass porcupine off my fence at two in the morning, but you best believe I take a quick look in my back yard before I let the dogs out now.
Speaking of dogs, sometimes the veggie heist will be an inside job. One of my dogs has evidently decided my collard patch is his personal snack cupboard. After I got rid of the caterpillar problem, I kept finding big bites out of the leaves closest to the outside of the garden. I couldn’t find any caterpillars or other insects, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was taking hunks out of my collards until I walked out in the yard to find my Maltese’s little white butt standing right in the garden grazing away like a cow. He’s also been lecherously eyeing the tomatoes ripening close to the ground, so needless to say, he is no longer allowed in the yard without supervision.
These lessons probably make it seem like gardening isn’t worth the effort, but honestly, I’ve had fun learning from my mistakes and dealing with all the little unexpected mishaps — murdering a few plants, solving a few problems, squirting one very unhappy porcupine with a garden hose, and harvesting a ton of veggies. It’s a lot of effort on the front end, but like everything else, you get better at it over time. The best thing about gardens is once you get them going, they do most of the work for you. I spent a lot of time digging and watering and planting in March and April, but now all I do is go pull weeds every once in a while, water every few days, and reap my harvest. It’s gotten a lot easier now that the harvest season has rolled around, but with all the lessons I’ve learned this year, I expect next year’s planting season will be smooth sailing.
