Robert and Alicia’s Garden

Recently-Picked Produce

one 13 oz zucchini
5oz hot peppers
5 radishes
2lbs green beans
one 10.5 oz tomato

Lessons Learned

• The zucchini plant needs 3 feet in all directions. Minimum. It will try to take as much space as it can.
• For buckwheat (or, presumably, any cover crop) to take, the garden needs to be broken and more-or-less level. Tossing it out onto clumpy soil doesn’t get any results. (I think Jesus said something about this once upon a time…)
• The support provided by tomato cages is less about the stalk and more about these gigantic orbs of fleshy, juicy goodness hanging off of these spindly branches. A single bamboo stick is fine to start, but more is needed pretty soon thereafter.
• Beans. Holy crap. Bush beans are no big deal to grow, but they do an annoyingly good job hiding their produce when it comes time to harvest. Pole beans (especially these Sultan Beans) grow like CRAZY, and they are basically veins that are reaching towards your house and would probably swallow it hole if given half a chance. While the bamboo sticks seemed like a just fine solution to start with, they outgrow them very quickly: some kind of line to grow along is necessary.
• Radishes and carrots aren’t worth the trouble. They’re temperamental, they grow weird, and you don’t get a lot of produce out of each plant. Probably going to be my opinion of root plants in general.
• It takes three solid weeks of covering an area with a tarp for all the weeds to die off. And even then, you’ve only got about a week before the weeds re-invade (or grow back up, or whatever). So whatever you’re doing with that dirt, do it fast.

BTW

Alicia took some photos, but she hasn’t uploaded them yet. I took some pictures of price tags at the grocery store, which we’ll use for calculating our strict ROI.

Found another rose token while putting buckwheat into the dead garden: maybe I’ve been watching too much Lisa Williams, but it seemed like a sign of Mr. Mallard’s approval. (More on rose tokens here.)

I’m looking at doing a podcast for Durham Locavores (obviously of interest to Durham foodies in general). Stay tuned for more.