Farewell to the 2018 Gardening Season

What can you say about a gardening season that was perfect for growing… weeds?

The detritus of our 2018 garden
makes its way to the transfer station

New England summers are notorious for being fickle.  May frosts, monsoon rains in June, July droughts, humidity festivals in August.  You name it, New England can deliver it.  And, this year, boy, did it deliver.

The lettuce, spinach, and beet seeds we planted in early April were washed away.  We replanted, and it was so cold that nothing germinated.  In mid-May, we had a 600-square-foot garden that was barren except for a large patch of dill that sprang from self-planted 2017-vintage seeds.  We were so desperate to show progress in the garden, we left it in place.

Our first square of corn was also a no-show for three weeks, even though we covered the area with netting to dissuade marauding crows.  Finally, in mid-June, we had sufficient sprouts that we could assemble a passable seven rows of corn – from the ten we originally planted.

Our vegetable garden
was under row covers to
keep out bugs

Because of the rains of May and June, we tented everything with row covers.  Our garden began to resemble a refugee camp.  Eggplant, zucchini, green beans, and winter squash were all sequestered until they burst out of their covers… whereupon the squash borers and Mexican bean beetles descended on the plants.

Some vegetables were a bust.  Five pepper plants mysteriously became three.  In the end, we harvested four usable peppers.  Our re-planted lettuce crop bolted so quickly we picked enough for perhaps half a dozen salads and I never did harvest any spinach.

All was not lost, of course.  Eight tomato plants thrived in the midsummer heat and began producing prolifically.  Our corn, not quite ‘knee-high by the Fourth of July’, grew like a teenager in July and early August; so much so that our first and second squares of corn looked identical despite having been planted 20 days apart.  A modest-sized third square produced enough September corn to be worth the effort to cajole it along. 

It was a banner year
for tomatoes

The weather was, apparently, perfect for cucumbers because we handed out dozens of them to our neighbors.  Our zucchini exploded between mid-July and mid-August to the point we had to pick twice a day lest they turn into baseball bats between sunrise and sunset.  We had our best crop ever of fennel, and harvested enough green beans before the bean-beetle onset to feed us through the winter.

We also had a bumper crop of weeds.  They grew everywhere, cozying up to plant roots, hiding between rows, and boldly popping up in pathways.  When we pulled the row cover off our second crop of green beans, the weeds were higher than the surrounding vegetables.

I have spent the past two weeks taking apart the garden - hauling it to the transfer station by the carload to ensure the hitchhiking bugs and diseases do not have an opportunity to burrow in for the winter – and, now, much of the garden is again bare ground.  The late arugula is thriving and I have hopes some late tomatoes will ripen. 

You might think from reading this that I’ve begun to despair of gardening.  Not for an instant.  It took three years to figure out how to grow fennel in our garden and, now that we’ve mastered it, we will enjoy its unique flavor for years to come.  We just enjoyed the last of our corn and marveled at its sweetness. 

Give up gardening because of a little rain and a lot of weeds?  Not in a hundred years.  Once it’s in your blood, it’s there forever.