The Garden Plot Thickens, Part II

What I’ve learned two months into growing produce

When I wrote this post about my first foray into vegetable gardening¹ last month, I didn’t necessarily plan on writing a follow up.

But the more I’ve witnessed my garden’s growth, which there’s been plenty of in the past month, the more I felt compelled to continue documenting what I’ve learned.

That, and it’s fun to put all the photos I’ve taken side-by-side to see the literal growth. 🙃

From this to this in two months!

When I ventured into this gardening journey, I knew I would have to do so with permission to make mistakes.

As a textbook over-thinker, I often let the thinking get in the way of the doing. I knew that if I wanted to successfully try my hand at gardening, I’d have to do so on my own terms.

That is, by jumping in headfirst and learning along the way, with success defined as knowledge gained rather than the produce yielded.

I think it’s kind of like work in this way — I learn best by doing. When the problem or situation at hand is right in front of me, I’m a lot more motivated. And, when working with reality instead of imagined or hypotheticals, I think I better cement the information in my mind too.

Case in point — I’d heard from both my boyfriend’s mom and a friend that I would need to prune my tomato plants. I clocked it in my mind as a “look up later” type of thing, only to realize a couple months in that I should’ve probably pruned them a lot earlier than I would’ve thought was necessary.

When I look back at my photos now, I can see that despite the plants’ small size, there were leaves I likely could’ve pruned. My partner’s mom had showed me how to remove the tiny “sucker” stems on her tomato plant, something I had no idea I needed to do. I had thought, got it, that’s easy.

However, due to the size my plants had already reached, I couldn’t see any of these in sight, likely because they’d grown past the point of their sucker stage.

I first documented my garden progress roughly a month after planting my produce starts. The plants had shown promising early growth but were still, by my definition, babies.

Then, in the one week I was away in May, they seemingly grew up into full-fledged teenagers overnight.

May 21st --> June 5th

Since then, the garden has continued to flourish thanks to the ample amount of sunlight it gets. Every time I check back, it’s a denser green forest with more flowering and signs of fruiting.

However, with more sunshine comes more responsibility, it seems. Now that summer is officially here and temperatures are rising, the garden requires a lot more watering, which can be difficult given that my garden plot is located at work, ~15 miles away from my home. My friend whom I’m sharing the plot with lives closer and is sometimes able to pop by on a weekend, but needless to say, our garden gets a lot more consistent watering during the work week.

I picked my first pickling cucumber last week, and have been observing more and more cherry tomatoes fruiting. They appear to still be a little ways off from ripening, but it’s encouraging nonetheless.

First cucumber & cherry tomato sightings

My heirloom tomato, on the other hand, is proving more problematic than the cherry variety. This past week I noticed several yellowing leaves which I intuitively pruned and took to be a sign of potential disease. (Without having done any research on it myself until the time of writing this, I had heard from multiple people that tomato plants can be finicky because of how susceptible they are to soil-born disease.)

My research tells me that it could indeed be disease, or overwatering (doubtful due to how fast the soil dries out in our plot), lack of nitrogen, or natural aging. I would like to chalk it up to the aging process but instinct is telling me I need to take action. My next step is to prune it more heavily, because after reading about it and looking at neighboring plots’ tomato plants, mine are way thicker and denser. Pruning should allow for better air flow and redirect the energy to grow fruit instead of more leaves. Now the question is, will doing so at this stage help, or is it too late?

Similar to my tomato plants, I let the cucumbers run a bit rampant before installing a trellis, which I did a couple weeks ago. Due to the vining of this plant, I knew from day one I’d need to get a trellis to encourage vertical growth if I didn’t want it taking over the whole bed. Alas, time got the best of me and I have no idea if it’s “too late” for this step either, but it can’t hurt to try, right?

I almost didn’t post this because it doesn’t look “pretty” but then thought it felt inauthentic not to show you both sides. If you look closely though, you can see a fledgling heirloom tomato in there!

The lettuce has been the easiest thing to grow. My only learning here so far is that they yield a lot. It’s typical for lettuce starts to come in packages of six, which I didn’t think much of since I didn’t know any better. But boy, I could do with less than half this amount! Between me and my friend, we can barely keep up with the lettuce production. Especially now that my summer CSA share has started and I’m getting more leafy greens that way, I don’t need to over index on lettuce.

It does feel rewarding though to make salads with leaves I plucked out of the ground with my own hands!

Garden salad & a gallon bag's worth of harvested leaves

Lastly, the bell pepper. This has been the slowest plant to grow so far, which was partially expected due to the longer harvest timeline of this fruit (in line with the heirloom at approximately 80 days, the longest duration of my five starts). However, I think it’s taking longer because it is overshadowed, literally, by its next-door neighbor heirloom. My suspicion is the plant is getting less light because of the shade from the tomato leaves, causing it to grow more slowly. Just this week I noticed the first small flower budding—a good sign, but I think it will be further helped along by pruning my tomato. Yet another good reason to prune.

This past week I experienced my first garden frustration feeling, when I came by to water on Monday and saw how wilted the plants had become due to the hot weekend. I gazed at my unpruned tomato plants and felt a bit of defeat at how unruly I’d let them become. So far, everything had been too easy. Was this the challenge, the midway point, that I needed to push through to see what good is waiting on the other end?

As I write this, it’s been a few days since I’ve seen the garden. My friend was on watering duty the tail end of this week so I have no idea how it will look when I visit tomorrow. I’m hoping the midday temperatures cool down a bit so that I can spend some time pruning this week.

But as with any new skill or hobby, I just have to remember, one step at a time. I’ve already learned so much more than I knew 60 days ago.

And despite the challenges, my garden is still a respite. When I found myself irritated at a work situation a couple weeks ago and stopped by the garden over lunchtime, within seconds of entering I felt calmer, as I admired the growth and smelled the tomato vines.

That, to me, makes the whole journey worth it.

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1. It turns out the majority of my “vegetable” garden is fruit, botanically speaking. Cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes—all fruits. Lettuce and celery are the only true vegetables since they are stems and leaves and don’t grow from a flower (the definition of a fruit).