How Does Your Garden Grow?

So it's been a rousing success, as the pictures can attest. Every ear of corn is developing silks (which means we'll be eating corn), the tomatoes are perfection (all three varieties), the peppers spicier than your average Latin lover, and the green beans? To die for!

On the whole, we've learned a lot this year, our cherry-popping virgin year of all-out vegetable growth. Never count your spinach before it's outside: One of the biggest disasters this year, as they all popped up on the dishwasher, but once they met the great outdoors? Not so much. Popeye would be disappointed. Apparently you need very sandy soil to grow spinach successfully (lesson number 1 for spinach), and even then it can be very finicky about soil moisture content (lesson number 2...)


Also, cucumbers suck. Or, at least, in my soil they do. I even bought the "Straight 8" variety, meant to withstand elephant stampedes and polar bear excursions. But where elephants and polar bears fear to tread, clay soil was the enemy it could not beat. I'll try again next year--after all, this fall I'll be getting bucket loads of cow poop from a local farmer who apparently is wallowing in the stuff in order to boost the "nitrogen content" of my soil (can't wait for fall! Who wants to help shovel some shit around?), and from what I hear, nothing beats cow shit when it comes to growing vegetables. Go circle of life!

Corn, however, I found almost too easy. I heard plenty of horror stories on the net about growing your own corn and I was wary, to say the least, about going this route in the vegetable world... ? Seems I should have worried more about the greens and less about the yellow... Who knew?