How not to grow vegetables
Amateur hour in the kitchen garden
Summer in Stockholm was late in arriving this year, and mostly wet and mild, rather than hot and sunny. After my third winter here, I was longing for summer (when I was blithe about the long dark winters Swedes warned me that three or four years in I would begin to find it harder, anyway…) so having experienced a boiling hot summer the previous year, I started my vegetables in grow houses in the kitchen early.
Then spring did not come. I waited for the frosty weather to pass. Then I grew impatient and in a mild week put out my pea plants, and, insanity, my cucumbers. A few days later frost struck. The peas were fine. Doughty little troupers. The cucumbers yellowed and died, even under my mini polytunnel. Shame-facedly I had to pull them out on the next dry day that wasn’t freezing, thinking about how all the seasoned gardeners who walked past my garden (it’s on a well-worn route to the forest) must have been tutting at my amateur mistake.
In my grow houses the beans were strangling each other. The tomatoes on the top shelf were beginning to bend over against the roof like old men. In despair I put potatoes in where I had pulled out the failed cucumbers. Still the sun refused to shine. The sharp chill persisted in the air, and every time I checked my weather app, just a few days ahead would be a plummet in temperature that would kill anything I tried to put out.
A windowsill of pumpkins (pumpkins?!) grew mildewed and pale. They needed potting on but I kept holding on thinking any day I’d be able to put them out in the garden. They went on the compost heap. Nobody was going to eat pumpkins anyway.
I don’t remember now what happened to the courgettes but I suspect they went the same way. The first set of tomato plants I put out bleached and died in chill winds on sunny days.
I composted the triffid-like bean plants that were hopelessly entwined. The tomatoes, too tall for the little plastic greenhouses, were potted up, staked, and arranged around the kitchen.
Basil, coriander and other tender herbs didn’t make it. There just is not room in my kitchen to pot on everything. We would be eating dinner in a jungle. There would be mutiny. The herbs either became pale and etiolated or entered into suspended animation in their tiny cells of nutrient poor seed-compost. Having struggled to find enough light and nutrients, they also gave up.
Eventually, and well after the end of May, something approaching real spring did arrive. Chilli plants went in where the tomatoes had wind-bleached and died. I planted beans directly into the soil underneath their wigwam supports. The peas had kept on stolidly throughout and began to give their first harvests of tiny, sweet peas that we all ate straight out of the pods.
I made some new beds. The remainder of my tomato plants went out, a mixture of a large red cordon tomato (seed packet lost, name never noted down), and a cherry, patio tomato called ‘sungold’. This latter one is a reliable cropper in a short summer and produces tomatoes as sweet and more complex in flavour than strawberries when eaten straight off the bush.
Something, probably a hare, was eating the tops off the chilli plants. I cannot build a hare-proof fence. I have no inclination to lie in wait for a hare and scare it away. Eventually the chillies advanced enough that a bit of nibbling could be endured.
Just when everything is in the ground and the weather is sunny and warm we go away for a week. My neighbour kindly watered the plants when we were away. Which was lucky because it was twenty-six degrees and sunny every day.
We enjoyed a few more hot sunny days after our return in the last week of June. I thought this was the arrival of the heatwave, like the one we had enjoyed the previous summer. Two to three weeks of blazing sunshine and temperatures hovering around twenty-eight were ahead of us. I would moan about heat, and the watering, but at least I would get an amazing crop of vegetables.
Instead the sunshine and hot days turned into thunderstorms, heavy rain, days of over cast weather, temperatures in the low twenties and now in August in the mid-teens. I planted rows of lettuce and beetroot. My lettuces came up in perfect, impossibly green rows. I let the slugs eat them all, because it was pouring with rain and I couldn’t be bothered to go out in the wet and the dark to pick off the slimy marauders. It has been a challenging summer for lazy gardeners (I have since re-planted the lettuces and cut a collection of cloches from small plastic bottles for when they emerge)!
Still, we’ve had a steady supply of peas, beans, and tiny, orange tomatoes, supplemented by an occasional (very small) pepper and slightly more chillies. The potatoes, once the weather dried up enough for me to get them out of the ground without being swamped in mud, are full of flavour, have an amazing texture, crisp like an apple when cut, and cook very quickly. Even in challenging conditions, with the wrong veg for the weather, and a lazy gardener, the crop was not disastrous, just a bit underwhelming.
My amateur experiments continue. The peas have been cleared out (I forgot to save any seed for next year!) and in their place I have planted cabbage seeds, two different red varieties, just what was available in our local, small garden centre. I do not think it is the right time to plant cabbages, but I have read that they can grow all year. I have a plan to make a frame and cover it with several layers of fleece so they may be protected by a blanket of snow from more severe temperatures, rather than frozen by a layer of snow directly on them. I have no idea if this will work. I plan to lift the frame and harvest one or two cabbages a week. They may freeze, rot, stop growing. I may trap slugs in with the cabbages in a warm, cosy, haven from the winter cold. I have literally no idea what will happen.
I have a packet of parsnip seed, just because that was one of the few vegetable seeds they had at the garden centre. I have never grown parsnips because they are notoriously temperamental. I have some carrot seed I bought earlier in the season. I’m planning on planting them in the space left by my beans when they stop cropping in a couple of weeks. I will check if they will be happy in nitrogen-rich soil.
I’m going to leave the potato bed fallow over the winter and maybe next summer too. Next year I’ll put beans in where the tomatoes were this year. It’s an experiment. I keep a gardening notebook, but it’s sporadic and haphazard.
In recent days I have trimmed off all the excess, slightly mildewed leaves, from the tomato plants and just left the trusses of tomatoes to hopefully ripen and if not to go into green-tomato chutney. I have fed them too. I have no idea if this will help.
I’m not a perfect vegetable gardener by any means. I have almost no experience, and little knowledge. Still, I get a lot of satisfaction out of my dabbling. The saying goes ‘Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good’. In the past I have been frustrated by my mistakes and failures, and given up on my vegetable-growing, but not this time. This time I have just allowed my failures, mistakes, and missteps, to wash over me, and not worried about them. The result is I’ve just kept on going and we’ve eaten peas, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and chillies fresh from the garden full of flavour and goodness. Just unearthing potatoes is one of the most satisfying feelings I’ve ever experienced. It’s like digging for treasure.
If all we amateurs get out of vegetable gardening is a sense of peace and pleasure, that’s something in these times that is truly valuable. However, I am getting more than that. I am getting food for my family. I know what has been sprayed on it (nothing), and I am learning, almost despite myself, how to grow vegetables more successfully. That is a skill, and a joy, we need for ourselves and we need to pass on to anybody who will pay attention.