How does your garden grow?

There was the year the nutria ate all the green bean vines. There was the year the squirrels discovered the corn. There was the year the birds got all the blueberries. There was the year a sweet little orange-brown fox ate all the strawberries. There was the year of blossom-end rot, the slug invasion, the aphid infestation, the flea beetle attack. The year of over-watering. The year of under-watering. The year of too hot too soon. The year of too rainy too long.

 There was the year of the baseball bat-sized zucchini—okay, that’s every year—but there was the year that the blossom-end-rot tomatoes coincided with the baseball bat-sized zucchini, and oh boy did we use those bats to hit some messy tomato home-runs into the compost pile. There was the year we had so many apples that we rented a press and made gallons of apple juice, and I made so many quarts of apple sauce that we were still dishing it out the following spring. There was the year that the trees suffered from apple scab and codling moths, and the biggest, most beautiful tree in the orchard, the Fuji, had one apple on its branches.

 My garden/farm measures 4,500 square feet. A single-story house built within the deer fencing that surrounds this plot would include a spacious primary bedroom (walk-in closet, ensuite) plus 3-5 addition bedrooms, 3-4 addition bathrooms, a great room, a gourmet kitchen, laundry room, mudroom. You get the idea. It is big. It includes 14 raised beds, in which I (sometimes with great success, sometimes with dismal failure) grow all the usual garden veggies, plus some Hail Marys—like my annual (failed) attempt to grow peppers that have the time to turn red. In the orchard are 5 apple trees, 3 pear trees, an Asian pear, which massively produce. Or don’t.

 As all who garden know, this is an act of ongoing, self-powered optimism. This year I have melon-sized melons for the first time ever. But I am also suffering an unexplainable cucumber failure. The oregano went crazy; the basil is taking a long vacation.

Really the only thing you can count on out there is the potato.

For more about the mighty potato, and my later-in-life love affair with the spud, here are a few links to stories published in farmer-ish magazine. (yes, 3 different stories)