When my parents were here in June, my Dad helped me build these grow boxes for our garden. I was excited for my first vegetable garden, and planted snap peas, zucchini, basil, tomatoes, peppers, spinach, and lettuce. Things got off to a nice start, and I was feeling pretty good.
Unfortunately, my beautiful plants have been long on foliage and short on fruit. The spinach bolted before I ever got more than one small salad. The lettuces are so bitter that we can’t eat them. The snap peas have produced maybe a couple of dozen peas, total. And my two pepper plants produce 1 pepper each. I don’t know if the problem is that it’s been too hot, too rainy, too shady, or if it’s just a clueless gardener.
My tomatoes and basil are doing swimmingly well, though. And my zucchini were looking fantastic, and staking them seemed to be a brilliant idea. We had grown about a half-dozen zucchini, but then we had a massive rain/wind storm come through that pushed over my stakes and snapped the stalks of 3 of my 4 plants. Maybe staking zucchini wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Put the lettuce in the fridge for a day or two to get rid of the bitter taste. Talk to Suzie about your gardening issues, she’s really frustrated too. It’s hard!
Thanks, Jared. I’ll have to try the fridge idea. Sue and I can definitely commiserate – gardening is tough!
Well we wish we just had a yard to even try a garden, but hopefully next year, and hopefully we can get something to grow (besides weeds)
Keep a garden journal, you will learn a lot each year and collectively. All gardeners have problems and learn something new every year. Keep it up, it is a good hobby.
We had the same problems. The herbs and Tomatoes worked out this year, but nothing else really did, and our five pepper plants produced a total of two peppers, one of which Beatrice picked before it was ripe.