Garden School For Disappointing Farmers

So we're coming up on four months since we started this blog to follow our efforts to become organic gardeners. We haven't had much success in our garden. The fruits of our labor to date include:

• Small windy rooty radishes (that we never ate)
• About 15 tiny beets (we ate about 5)
• Half a dozen heads of lettuce (no other salady items to eat with them)
• Approx 36 pea pods (all of which were eaten)

But this week our first cucumber has reached maturity and was ready to be picked and four more are fast approaching with a half dozen mini's trying to become serious contenders as well. Where are those heads of lettuce now?

Our tomatoes too have started to produce millions of green tomatoes but only two are starting to turn reddish orange. I already see signs of the blight coming and I'm not sure how many of these tomatoes will ever make it to our table.

We haven't lost faith yet. Our garden is quite flush with green growing things strewn about. We have four (or five) brussel sprouts that are starting to form little nodules at the stems of each leaf. what a funny system for growing eatable items. Our second round of carrots are growing tall stems, but these will stay in the ground till early fall... or maybe till after the first frost as I hear it sweetens them up. We accidentally weeded out most of our first round of carrots before we understood that carrot sprouts look like the grass we keep weeding. Our herbs are doing quite well and I'm especially happy about Meg's cilantro as they're the only herbs we (she) planted from seed... somehow planting seedlings always feels like cheating to me. On the other hand all those who planted seedlings and partially matured plants are having more success than we are, but so are those with better located plots. Our plots is shaded by trees until 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning and again by 4:00 in the afternoon. Most gardens have sun from 7:00 to 7:00.  Our zucchinis have flowered at least 70 times but only two pathetic zucchinis have started growing. Our peppers are starting to produce baby peppers and we're hopeful that we'll soon be enjoying some of those. Our butternut squash and cantaloupe are kreeping longer daily with signs of flowering but no fruits yet. We planted eggplant and corn rather late (June 30th) and they're both growing but I fear not fast enough to give us much if anything at all. The watermelons never germinated.

We're calling this year "garden school" where we are learning through trial and error and through conversations with more experienced gardeners. I'm already thinking more about next year than I am about what I'll get this year. I have plans... ideas... experiments that I want to try. Today I'm a fairly disappointing farmer, but my day will come. Give me a couple more years to play with my food and I'll be making this work far more efficiently.