Learning to grow

  I like to think I'm not much of a quitter, but one area where I'm having trouble is gardening. Once something starts to shows signs of heading south (dying), I have to resist the urge to...

a) neglect it altogether, thereby assisting the process.

b) toss it into the "nice try" bucket and then neglect replanting and trying again.

Our access to local foods being what it is, it's easier to give up, to tell myself that I'll do better when I've got my own ground to dig in, when I'm not relegated to container gardening. What bullshit! If I don't learn how to container garden, how to keep stuff alive in small batches, how exactly do I expect better yields on a larger scale?

The local foods sitch will definitely supplement us nicely, at least. Right now, the tailgate markets are mainly pushing greens still, but I'm betting in about another month, we'll see more variety.

Yesterday, when we were heading out to lunch/dinner, I looked over the plants and saw those damn tiny nibbling bugs (and their equally tiny eggs) that live on the bottoms of leaves and surreptitiously destroy plants. We rubbed off as many as we could, and when we got back, I went out with soapy water and treated the leaves on the peppers. Those seedlings were gorgeous when I bought 'em last week, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let those go...

But on the same rack, most of the herbs are a joke, and our bean plant yield is slowly waning to half what we started with. I'm not certain why some plants give up when others don't, when they all appear to look the same, but I'm determined to keep alive the beans that look hardy.

But why haven't I replanted tomatoes, peppers, greens, and herbs since the initial failures? Poor time management and cowardice are the only reasons I can come up with. I'd love to be picking my own tomatoes off the vines and canning them come fall. I want to be able to grab a handful of cilantro or basil from my herb garden when I'm cooking dinner. So what the hell's stopping me?

Quit ranting, Melanie. Go outside.