Kneipp Family Victory Garden - Update, July, 2009

My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant's point of view. ~H. Fred Ale

I am pleased to note that we are quickly approaching the harvest portion of our gardening chores. However, there were a few missteps in planning the garden that have lead to some unanticipated results.

First of all, I forgot to plant any zucchini. Flat out forgot. And we love zucchini bread so much around here - now we are going to have to get ours from the produce market. Lame.

Second of all, I didn't give a lot of thought to how aggressive the cucumbers that we planted were going to be! They have started snaking their way up the sweet pea stakes and have all but eaten one of my green pepper plants. Not good...I still have one green pepper plant that is holding on for dear life and has 3-4 little peppers budded out. If the cucumber will keep it's distance a little bit, we may be eating stuffed peppers from our own garden yet!!

Thirdly, I gave thought to the fact that we needed to plant corn in rows, so that they could cross-pollinate, but I did not spend a lot of time in thinking about the fact that the growth of their neighbors, our tomato plants, would block almost all of their sunlight. Oops. We may or may not get any corn cobs out of the deal...but definitely learned a lesson or two on that one.

Finally, we have a ton of tomatoes on all 3 kinds of plants, Brandywine, Cherry & Roma...however, just 2 little individualist cherry tomatoes are showing any signs of ripening. I do hope that it's not a repeat of last year when we had to eat fried green tomatoes just to feel like we hadn't failed miserably.

So, there you have it. I would think we're at the mid-way point for the Garden of 2009. Once again, I have learned a lot of great lessons, the greatest one being: I have no flipping clue what I am doing in the garden and if I EVER hope to feed this family of 5 with home-grown produce, I better get some books and read up over the off-season. There's always room for improvement, right?