Celebrating Gardening Fails

Things are really heating up in the garden, and there's this feeling of urgency as everything is suddenly eager to grow. Just look at my comfrey, which can go from nothing to lush foilage at staggering speed:

Flowering comfrey looking lush this time of year

On the other hand, we have had a rainy couple of weeks and the slugs and snails are everywhere. I have a battle on my hands keeping them off all the lovely new seedlings in my garden beds. 

I sowed six runner beans along the back garden trellis a couple weeks ago. It was very rainy when they started to sprout, and all but one was devoured by the snails as soon as they came up. By the time I spotted the problem there were only two seedlings left. I employed my favourite trick for beans in this situation: copper tape. It's meant to be affixed to plant pots and such as it deters slugs and snails. But I use it to fashion a little loop to fit around the base of the tall thin bean stalks, and it works pretty well. Unfortunitely my placement was less than ideal on one of them; now I have just the one runner bean coming in. It's doing well but I'm going to need to start some more. I think I'll start the seeds in pots in my little seedling shelves this time and then plant them out - with copper wire fixed round them.

The one remaining runner bean doing its best

My carrot seedlings were also devistated. I'm still getting the  hang of growing carrots. I always read that they are best grown by direct sowing. I am getting a clearer picture of why I've had such bad luck with this method in the past. I sowed a one-meter row of seeds at about a 1-2 cm spacing. That's a lot of seedlings. At first they all started popping up, but then I started noticing them disappearing. I never caught a snail in the act, but I'm pretty sure that's what was getting to them. Carrot seedlings are tiny; they would be completely dissapear. By mid last week the last of them were gone. However, carrot seeds are tiny and typically come in packs of around a thousand. I just started sewing new seeds into the gaps. It's a lot less effort than trying to protect the tiny seedlings, but I've yet to see if it yeilds results. I had two good seasons with carrots before this one. This Winter I sowed from seed, but into a large terra cotta pot on the deck. A location less likely to get invaded by snails. And last Summer I bought carrot seedlings and planted them out. Despite the warnings about transplanting carrot seedlings, they did very well.

If you hadn't noticed, I'm here to tell you about my gardening fails today. It can seem like the ardent gardeners in your life or on the Internet have it all figured out. I'm here to say, everyone has gardening fails. The thing is, I may get dissapointed, but not discouraged. I look at that blank space in my garden and I see opportunity. Opportunity to learn something, yes, but also a place to plant something new. Especially this time of year, there's always more things I'd like to grow than what I've actually got room for. Take my garlic crop, for example.

I devoted an entire square meter to planting garlic this Winter, which seemed like a great idea at the time. The first thing that went wrong was that out of over 20 cloves planted, only six actually grew. This was probably due to the fact that I used grocery store garlic, which is always a gamble. The last time I used the grocery store stuff, every one of my 16 cloves grew, so you never know. The next thing that happened is it started looking a little sad, a little dry around the leaf ends. It had been a dry Winter, which is unusual for our area, and it was a while before I noticed the problem. I had also run out of mulch and so broke my own rule of always mulching, which contributed to the dryness. 

By the time I started watering them more, they were already stressed, which lead to further problems. A stressed plant is more vulnerable to pests and infections. When I went to do a Spring weeding, I noticed aphids on them. I sprayed the heck out of them and that seemed to work, but that is when I started noticing all the rust. I have multiplying onions growing nearby, and I was worried the rust would spread to them. And that is when I decided to give up on my doomed garlic crop. I could keep removing rusty leaves and try to keep them limping along, and get a half dozen undersised bulbs for my efforts, or I could call it. I was a little dissapointed to pull them out, but I immediatly started thinking of all the possibilties for this one square meter of real estate in mid Spring. 

I decided to pop my corregette seedling in there, as it was ready for planting out and my previous plan for it - the front garden bed - wasn't ready yet. It immediately started getting nibbled by the snails - but I empolyed another trick involving copper tape and so far it's doing well. I've stuck some rocket seedlings around the edges as a newly planted corrgette seedling is always a little awkward. It's a tiny thing but you know by high Sumer it's going to turn into a monster that takes up a square meter and then starts elbowing its neighbours. In the mean time I hate to see all that garden space to to waste. My solution was a nice quick crop of leafy greens around the margins. 

Midway through planting rocket to keep the courgette company

What I'm trying to tell you - aside from some neat tips for dealing with snails - is that avid veggie gareners like myself don't neccesarily have some kind of special ability to keep plants alive and thriving. I gather my knowledge, my experience, my little tricks. But look, a veggie garden is a complex, dynamic ecosystem vulnerable to inumerable variables, many of them outside my ability to forsee or control. The thing is that I just really love veggie gardening. That weird combination of knowledge and experience, forsight and goals, interacting in inumerable ways with an unpredictable world is part of what I actually find exciting about gardening. The thing that makes me a lover of gardening is that I'm going to respond to gardening fails with enthusiam. With scheming and problem solving. And then I'm going to chuck a whole lot more veggies in there and wait to see what happens next.