#1 Skip the cherry tomatoes. We don't eat enough of them to justify the use of the space, and most of them ended up being chicken food. Next year, I'll instead plant more yummy Black Sea Man slicers.
#2 Use soaker hoses. I failed to this past year because it was going to be a pain in the ass to thread a soaker hose into the different beds scattered across the yard. But the hot and dry summer we had absolutely demolished many of our plants long before their time was up. I am simply too busy to spend an hour watering every day.
#3 Forget the brassicas. The soil is too poor right now (though we're trying to change that!), and the cabbage worms were too much to keep up with. Besides, the plants are huge and we're tight on space.
#4 One Sahuaro hot pepper plant is plenty. These prolific producers are still pumping out more spicy green gems than I can possibly use... and we made the mistake of planting two!
#5 Plant more winter squash. They produced well with very little effort on our part, and we loooovvvveee to eat them!
#6 Order lady bugs early in the season to control aphids. Toward the end of spring our lettuce patch was infested and it was too late to do anything about it.
#7 Skip the tomato cage business all together. The cages were too small and flimsy to support the massive plants and we ended up resorting to tree stakes... and when it came time to pull the plants out it was a real chore to untangle them from the wire cages they'd outgrown!
#8 Mulch heavily, mulch early, mulch often. Aside from the moisture retention and weed inhibition mulch provides, the quality of the soil right now in fall is much, much better in the beds I mulched as opposed to the beds I did not mulch with leaf compost. It broke down beautifully and now the beds are ready for fall planting.
#9 Potatoes should be grown in the ground, under dirt. Our experiment with the taters in bags and covered with straw yield lush, green, beautiful foliage... and two spuds the size of dimes. Total failure.
#10 Plant way more traditional 'pesto' basil plants and fewer smaller leaf flavored varieties. We pretty much used the basil strictly for making pesto, and while the other varieties were delicious, they were much more labor intensive to harvest and yielded a great deal less leafy goodness.
1 comment:
great suggestions. I also decided cherry tomatoes are not worth the effort. I'll probably keep one on the porch in a bucket for Miss Ruby. She loves to walk outside and munch them. We also ditched the cages last year and used bamboo staked and sticks from the yard, I might do a trellis system next time with green peas on one side and tomatoes up the other. Too bad about your taters, I thought your idea sounded cool!
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