You don’t have to be the perfect gardener. You don’t have to do everything right. You just have to try.
Nobody is as good a gardener as God. He can make anything grow anywhere he wants. Just look at these petunias.
Petunias in Asphalt
These are growing right out of the asphalt on our driveway. They’ve been growing there all summer. It has been hot and dry, and these things looked like this all summer. I’ve never watered them. Neither has Marisa. I figured, God has this. These are his and I’m not going to mess with them.
Besides, I have plenty of other things we’ve planted that I can tend to.
This year we grew carrots, beets, tomatoes, peppers, corn, summer squash, winter squash, watermelon, cantaloupe, broccoli, bok choi, lettuce, garlic, leeks, potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, peas, pumpkins, and a lot of herbs. And of course our berries, strawberries, raspberries, currants, loganberries, blueberries, blackberries, grapes, oh, and we finally got 2 pears from our pear trees. We grew sunflowers, marigolds, cosmos, petunias, snapdragons, alyssum, zinnias, hollyhocks, mums, and probably a dozen more that I can’t remember right now.
Some things did pretty well. Others not so much. But we keep trying. We find things that work for something, others that don’t. We tried different types of commercial soils and composts, made our own compost, made different mixes of soils for seed starting, containers, and raised beds. Some worked really well, some were absolutely horrible.
We continue to up our watering game by installing drip irrigation wherever we can, and we have a 15 gallon sprayer that we tow behind the lawn tractor to water things we can’t.
We are becoming more firm believers in fertilizing. We have tried multiple methods of injecting fertilizers into the irrigation system, and I believe we’ve found one that works really well. We use granular fertilizers in the soil prep before planting, and add it throughout the year. We’ve had three pear trees that we planted probably 15 years ago, that have never produced anything. Of course we’d never done anything to help them. Last fall, after seeing a video where they heavily fertilize their fruit trees, we tried it, giving them each about a pound of balanced fertilizer. This spring for the first time we had flowers, and they turned into 2 pears. I know it’s not a lot, but we’ve learned something from it, and have fertilized those trees more this year, and will continue to do so.
We are also paying more attention when some types of crops are listed as heavy feeders. We know now to fertilize them more. Garlic, for one. We did alright, but the heads weren’t huge, and we didn’t feed them nearly enough.
We are also actually not starting as many seeds as we used to. We would plant a whole flat (or more) of tomatoes. Problem is we don’t have room for that many tomato plants. So we’d overcrowd the beds where we put them. It wouldn’t be uncommon to have a 2 x 8 foot raised bed with 20 tomato plants in it. This year we only planted 30 (yes, I know I said ONLY 30) tomato plants, 18 San Marzanos and 12 Brandywines. We planted 9 in each of 2 beds, and in 2 more beds we only put 4 tomato plants into each. We got a LOT of tomatos, but what’s surprising is the beds of 4 did way better than any of the overcrowded plants ever did.
We also had about 30 zucchini and yellow squash plants. That’s probably way more than we need. But the squash bugs and squash vine borers were bad again this year. All of the pumpkins that we put on the pumpkin arch were decimated. So now we just have beans growing there. We’ll keep trying to find ways to control these pests. I have some ideas for next year.
White flies and spider mites were more pests we dealt with this year. White flies in the greenhouses was particularly bad. Seems spraying them is about the only thing you can do.
We have a lot of shady areas, and not a lot of full sun areas. So we make due. We expanded into one area that had sun, but wasn’t easy to water. We ran hose and a water timer into that area and it did really well this year. It’s where we put our 10 x 20 greenhouse.
The point of this is to just get out there and try. You won’t be able to grow like God, but you can enjoy your successes and learn from your failures. And you might get some good food out of it.
