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Well, I don’t want to freak you out or anything but today marks my final garden post for the 2022 growing season. How did that happen so quickly?! In it, I share the garden lessons I learned this year. They’re pretty wide-ranging but valuable nonetheless.
You can read my post underneath the video below. My garden lessons included a big surprise on how unprepossessed soil can impact a tomato plant’s worthiness to viridity and set fruit. Yikes. You might think that’s a no-brainer but it isn’t when the soil is still unprepossessed virtually the 1st of June! You’ll moreover learn how unrepealable crops performed for us.
I’m pretty excited to share my newest video with you! Why? Well, I recently had a post on Facebook well-nigh how cute our pygmy nuthatches are when they come in for a drink. In the post, I mentioned how we have our birdbaths set up to automatically refill everyday. A few folks said, “How do you do that?!!! Will you share that information with us?” At first, I felt a bit daunted by it considering Bill is the fix-it guy virtually here, not me. And he prefers to be behind the camera rather than in front of it! So he kindly assembled the various parts one would need to either refill a birdbath automatically or to have a container watered automatically, and then coached me on the methods. So that’s what this video is all about. I’m hoping you will enjoy it and consider setting up a similar system in your own garden. But I’ve gotta hand it to Bill: he is so smart well-nigh figuring these sorts of things out, to save us time and energy! Thank you, honey.
Here’s my garden column:
by Susan Mulvihill
There were plenty of lessons to be learned during this year’s growing season. I thought 2021 was challenging, what with the drought, excessively upper temperatures and wildfire smoke. Surely 2022 couldn’t be any worse, right?
The start of this season brought us a lot of rain and unprepossessed temperatures that lingered for far too long. Cool-season vegetable crops didn’t mind but warm-season crops took issue with those conditions.
Even though I waited until nearly June 1 to plant my tomato seedlings, they struggled for months. We ended up with a small harvest by the end of the season that paled in comparison to our usual haul.
In past years, I’ve covered the soil in each tomato bed with red plastic mulch to prewarm the soil. This year, I stopped using it considering I don’t like advocating the use of increasingly plastic in our daily lives. It turns out I picked the wrong spring to take a stand and am seriously considering prewarming the soil next year with my leftover plastic.
Last year, my ‘Musica’ pole beans struggled mightily and produced poorly. After researching increasingly heat-tolerant varieties, I grew ‘Fortex’ and ‘Rattlesnake’ beans. While the latter did fairly well, the ‘Fortex’ was very prolific. I’ll definitely grow that one then in 2023.
I’m going to skip growing leeks next year. They’ve unchangingly been amazingly vigorous but this year, they bolted to seed and their normally tender stems were thick and woody.
This was definitely a good year to mulch virtually everything we grew. Mulch helps the soil retain moisture and, as an widow bonus, it makes it increasingly difficult for weed seeds to germinate. From here on out, we gardeners really need to focus on water conservation and mulching is a unconfined way to make a difference in the value of watering we need to do.
I learned that normally heat-intolerant lettuce plantings will grow a lot longer if you imbricate their bed with a 30 to 50 percent shade cloth. We enjoyed salad greens through the month of August, which is amazing.
Unfortunately, I moreover discovered that potato plants don’t like shade reticulum at all. When the forecast showed temperatures climbing into the low 100s, Bill and I suspended shade reticulum over two of our tomato beds and draped it over five of the reticulum grow tons that contained half of our potato crop. The foliage in those tons completely died back, while the potato plants in the other five tons remained lush and green.
It’s embarrassing to shoehorn this but one of my goofs was to plant too many winter squash and pumpkin seedlings into the two raised beds I’d set whispered for them. Next year, I’ll try to have some restraint when planting the seeds.
I mentioned 2 weeks ago that I’m starting to get into succession planting techniques. They involve shielding planning so one can take wholesomeness of uneaten space virtually unrepealable crops that take time to grow and stuff ready to plant a new yield as soon as one finishes. I’m trying to come up with a record-keeping system that will enable me to do that.
What is one last takeaway from the 2022 growing season? Two zucchini plants were plenty.
This is my final post for the 2022 garden season. You can follow my blog on Susansinthegarden.com, or read my daily posts on Facebook and Instagram (Susansinthegarden), so please waif by for a visit.
Susan Mulvihill is tragedian of “The Vegetable Garden Problem Solver Handbook” and “The Vegetable Garden Pest Handbook.” She can be reached at Susan@SusansintheGarden.com. Watch this week’s video at youtube.com/susansinthegarden.
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