Empty Beds

Every time I open Instagram I see pictures of verdant vegetable gardens and wicker baskets full of perfect looking produce. Then I look outside at my vegetable garden and it looks nothing like those other pictures. My garden is suffering from poor germination rates and poor seedling survival, it has far more empty beds than I would like, and those beds with plants in them look sparsely populated. I could take pictures that make the garden look amazing, but I know that is not the reality. However, because of all this sub-optimal success I have learnt a lot more this year about how the garden, and the greenhouse, behave. I would never have guessed that my seedlings in pots are cooler in the greenhouse than they are outside when the temperature is 35 degrees and there is full-on sun. But in the middle of summer the greenhouse is shaded in the afternoon by the tree that grows beside it, and direct sun on black plant pots makes the soil incredibly hot which many of my seedlings did not like at all.

This is my third summer with this garden and I still haven’t quite grasped how many seedlings it takes to fill each bed, and how to work the successional planting, I can only just manage one crop per bed, never-mind two! But what I realised last year was that there was no point growing vegetables that we didn’t normally eat, because we still didn’t eat them, even when they came from the garden. So my natural ability to successfully grow cabbages is a bit of a wasted talent! This does mean my options are somewhat limited, we have a core selection of vegetables that we eat a lot of, so these were my focus this year. Tomatoes being number 1 on that list, and thus the reason why I have 122 tomato plants, perhaps a little excessive for 2 people! But even with that ridiculous number we are not overwhelmed with tomatoes…yet. The fox has eaten more of the large plum tomatoes than we have, and a significant proportion of one particular variety have blossom end rot so are ending up on the compost heap (and on the “don’t grow again” list). But also I intentionally staggered the sowing of the tomato seeds in the hope that the later sown plants that are in the greenhouse will give us fresh tomatoes through until December and possibly beyond. Whether they do or not waits to be seen. So despite several empty beds, I can safely say that we are not likely to starve this summer, as I can live for a long time on tomato sauce and pasta!