Here we are just a couple of months away from a new growing season, and I have reason to hope. Unlike previous years, I’ve prepared. I’ve done research. I’ve even made a color-coded planting chart. I’ve selected seeds from various sources for plants that I think (fingers crossed) may actually work in this unkind environment. And I’m starting to figure out what to do about the bugs. When I started gardening in this dry, empty, and secluded desert, I didn’t realize that it takes the insects a full growing season to arrive. But when they find you, and they will find you and your lovely little oasis, they go on a feeding and reproducing frenzy that will strip the life out of garden. Sadly, I’ve come to terms with the fact my first year’s crazy overgrown haphazard garden and bumper harvest is destined to never to be repeated, but there is a chance, maybe, that I can have a reasonably decent garden.
This year I commit to giving up on zucchini. While zucchini does grow here and even grew prolifically our first year, I just can’t watch the squash bugs drain the vitality and health from plant after plant until there’s nothing left. Instead I’ll be planting tatume squash, which are sometimes called mexican zucchinis and about a dozen other names. They are drought tolerant and the squash bugs aren’t supposed to like them very much. We’ll see about that. To hedge my bet, I’m also growing one blue hubbard squash. Do I really want a giant hubbard squash? No, not really, but it’s supposed to be like the pied piper for squash bugs. All the squash bugs in the garden should flock to this one plant and leave everything else alone. Again, I don’t know if it will work, but I read a research paper and that said some organic gardeners were having great success with this method of squash bug control. Will it work in my desolute ecosystem? Who knows.
There will also be no beans in our garden. In theory, they work well as a fall crop, but as a spring crop, they don’t produce much, if anything, and just feed a variety of noxious bugs. So mostly they take up precious space in the garden and make me feel like a failure. I don’t need that sort of negativity in my life.
I’m also scaling back the tomatoes. Between the massive tomato worms and the spider mites, our harvest last year was aboslutely abysmal. So we’ll try 4 plants (instead of 14), and they will be interspersed with tomatillos (which tomato worms don’t seem to like that much) and marigolds that are supposed to have some anti-insect magical powers or so I hear. This combination of plants with different heights will also allow some space for the plants to breath and make it possible for me to regularly spray the plants with water to cut down on the spider mites (in theory anyway).
My cucumbers last year were a tortured crop. Plagued with disease and bugs, the few cucumbers I got were malformed and disgusting. This year, I’m trying two varieties that are supposed to be disease and bug resistant, and they couldn’t be more different from each other. The persian cucumbers should be dainty little 3 inch long fruit, where as the armenian cucumbers will be a massive 12+ in. fruit that’s techinically a cucumber-flavored melon. I’m kind of hoping the persian variety works best, because what in the world am I going to do with a plethora of massive cucumbers?
Will any of this work or will it just end in failure and lead to a foul depression, making me wonder if I had been cursed by the whatever sprites or elves are religanted to the the almost uninhabitable lands of hell? I wouldn’t recommend playing the odds on this one, but I’m playing the odds anyway. It’s probably a good thing I don’t frequent casinos.
Gardening in Hell 