Last years gardening experiment was great – for our first year, but like anything else, this year I’m going to be making some changes and hopefully it will be even better.
Last year I learned quite a bit about starting too early, putting items outside too early, starting from seeds, planting too many of one thing (helloooo 24 tomato plants), and what grows best and what’s a waste of time.
Didn’t Make The Cut
Last year I tried my hand at a number of veggies which just aren’t going to be going in this year (at least not in planters on the patio). The veggies which will be ‘in the ground or nothing’ are:
- Carrots – As much as I love carrots, growing them in a planter yields tiny carrots, as well as not enough to make them worth while. I may have gotten 3 or 4 meals out of taking up a LOT of space in on of my larger rectangular planters, not again – besides, they’re pretty darn cheap in the stores anyhow.
- Peppers – Not a chance these are being grown again, especially from seed as by the time I got any fruit at all, it was in November I think, and they were TINY! Nope, not again.
- Mint – I have no idea what made me think I wanted as much mint as I planted, I guess it was just that I had this package of ALL KINDS of seeds, why not plant a few more then necessary? Umm.. wrong idea.. save the damn seeds Lenny, cuz you don’t need 5 mint plants.
- Lavender – Yeah lavender is useless as a cooking agent, great for making things smell nice and blah, blah, blah.. I’m sure there are lots of interesting things you can do with Lavender – but I’ve yet to find anything worthwhile… besides, I think it’s a perennial, gonna come back again and again anyhow.
Made The Cut
I will be re-planting the following as I found the plants yielded lots of product and in the end I found well worth the effort in seeding them or planting.
- Beans – holy beans, we had two or three planters full of beans and they were great. Yielded quite a bit even from one single plant. Will be planting more of these this year.
- Tomatoes - I’m sort of undecided on how many I want to plant this year, but I know I’m going to NOT plant a lot on the deck in containers, they just ended up being really small. I’m also only going to plant ONE per container. Since I had so many last year, I got greedy and it ended up biting me in the ass as most of the containers with more than one plant just ended up producing tiny tomatoes. I’m also going to plant more in the ground as the ones from the ground ended up being MUCH larger, oh, and buying some already started instead of from seed as well. I love tomato plants.
- Lettuce – Lettuce is the all-star of the garden, which is part of the reason I’ve already started planting a bunch which is sitting in the kitchen as we speak. You chop some off, and it re-grows. This is the leafy variety which I’m really not picky about anyhow.. honestly I don’t think we had to buy lettuce all last summer, and hopefully this summer will be the same as I’m growing a LOT more.
New This Year
After the fall was over, I looked back and wished I had grown a number of things, this year the following are going to be in containers and in the garden somewhere.
- Basil – I have no idea how or why I didn’t plant this last year, I love everything about fresh basil, the smell, the taste, how well it goes with fresh mozza and balsamic dressing. Yep, going to have a lot of basil this year.
- Oregano – At the end of last year, we went out to Liz’s grandmothers place and stole an Oregeno plant which was absolutely ENORMOUS in her back yard. Ok, we didn’t steal the whole thing, just a split, but looking forward to having oregano this year, it’s a perennial too.. so it’ll just keep growing back. I like that idea.
- Blueberries – I don’t know the first thing about Blueberries and honestly didn’t think anything about planting one, but after reading about them here, I decided that I’m going to buy a blueberry bush and plant it somewhere. Hopefully it works out.
So that’s pretty much it, I would expect a lot more garden posts in the future from me as the weather gets a lot warmer over the coming months, if anyone else out there has any suggestions on anything to grow this year, or anything to do with food, or even weight loss products that they use, I’m always up for suggestions!