Winter weather has been raging across the United States and while I’m not spending much actual time in our garden, the new calendar year always encourages me to think about my previous year of gardening. This year in the garden, as every other year, I tried, I learned, I succeeded and I failed.
I thought I’d take this opportunity to look back at 2023 and share a couple of those successes, failures and other takeaways from the garden.
Blooms For Days and Weeks and Months
Our yard was nearly all lawn when we moved in at the beginning of March 2020. That first year I began sheet mulching over the lawn and transforming the area into a cottage-garden-inspired bed of mostly native perennials.
This summer – our fourth here – the plants really started to fill in the space.
Last year I made a concerted effort to plant more natives that bloom earlier in the season both to provide food for our local pollinators and for our own enjoyment. By April and May, the golden alexander, Virginia bluebells and prairie smoke were flowering and the garden bloomed non-stop through the end of September. I was delighted.
That’s not to say that my work is done. Far from it. The left side of the garden bloomed mostly from April to mid-July and the right side of the garden bloomed from mid-July through September. It felt florally lopsided for most of the summer so this year I’ll try to move things around a bit to remedy that.
A Flowering Pirate Ship
A little over a year ago we built a new set of raised beds in our backyard to make the most of our awkwardly-shaped corner vegetable patch. Last winter I would dream up different planting arrangements and ponder where the tomatoes or corn or radishes might go. In early spring I got to work planting snap peas, kale, lettuce and radishes and I did a pretty good job of keeping nearly every square foot of those beds full of vegetables till early fall.
I did get a lot of peas, kale, radishes, garlic, corn and basil. Two weeks ago I was still harvesting carrots and lettuce. That’s not to say that everything I planted was productive.
The Cauliflower That Never Flowered
It’s tough to beat the magic of digging up potatoes. Unlike tomatoes or peas, which you can watch ripen, the growth of potatoes is well hidden so you never know exactly what you’ll find underground.
In previous years I would delightedly dig up dozens of beautiful little taters. This summer, I had to root around in the soil for a bit before I even discovered one. Another ten minutes of thorough sifting produced seven additional small potatoes. Not the bumper crop I was hoping for.
Similarly, my tomatoes had an underwhelming summer too. I suspect that some sort of critter was eating our tomatoes though I didn’t think that any of the animals in our backyard liked eating tomatoes. And then are the two cauliflower plants that never produced a cauliflower. I still haven’t decided whether I’ll try for cauliflower again this summer. Please share any and all tips you have.
That Time the Nasturtiums Took Over
In an attempt to soften the edges of the new raised beds and integrate them into the rest of the yard, I planted the edges with sweet peas and nasturtiums. The plants flourished. The sweet peas creeped up the outer walls of the raised beds and the nasturtiums spilled over the sides just like I was hoping. But they did a little too well. The nasturtiums started dominating the beds.
And then came the aphid infestation. I’ve heard of folks planting nasturtiums to draw aphids away from other plants but in this case, having nasturtiums everywhere just meant there were aphids everywhere. I could barely even see the stems of the plant – they were entirely coated with the black insects.
Maybe I was doing all my neighbors a favor and drawing the aphids away from their yards? Next year I’ll still plant nasturtiums – I do love them – but I’ll do so sparingly.
A Meadow Comes to Life
The front and side of our yard were covered in lawn when we moved in. It was a tricky area to garden because much of that space is a steep slope. My gardening gurus, John Totten and Linda Kramer, came up with a plan to turn that slope into a meadow of little bluestem, phlox, asters, rattlesnake master, skullcap and other natives. We started planting the slopes in 2021.
Here’s what that same area looked like this year:
It’s amazing to see how far those plugs have come. Now that they’ve grown in, the individual plants merge together in a magical way to form something that’s greater than its parts.
A Pretty Fig Deal
Over the last few years, my dad had been growing a lot of fruit in his Oregon backyard. He was busy harvesting blueberries and raspberries and apples and he’d recently planted a hardy kiwi vine and a fig tree. When he realized that the birds were eating all the figs, he built a cage around the tree. My dad died this past April and wasn’t around this summer to monitor the situation or sample any figs. I wonder what kind of fruiting happened in his backyard this summer.
I planted a fig tree in our backyard in June. I planted it close to an exterior stone wall of the house, which will hopefully retain some heat and keep the tree comfortable through the winter. The tree was under two feet tall when I bought it and it grew faster than expected. I’d call Brooke out every few weeks to see how big our fig had gotten. By the end of the summer, the tree was over five feet tall.
It started to sprout tiny figs in September but it was too late in the season for them to mature. I wish I could have sent photo updates to my dad.
My friend Gretchen Henderson always talks about the value of “productive failure” in her writing workshops. The garden is also a great place for productive failures because the knowledge gained from our garden can always be implemented in the next growing season. I’ll be spending the next few months looking out the window and poring through plant catalogs as I make my plans for 2024’s growing season. So far my plans include more rocks, more logs, more native flowers, more experiments and – most certainly – more productive failures.
What were the successes and productive failures in your gardens this year? I’d love to hear about them.
And one more thing: I’ve been staying in Tucson, Arizona for the past few days and it’s been amazing to be surrounded by plants that are completely foreign to me. I’ll be writing more about this soon but here’s a photo from Saguaro National Park for now:
I love how your native garden matured! Looks very pretty.
I love that meadow area, Boaz- it looks just gorgeous. What a transformation !