OK, by request, one of our readers wanted to make sure we were human and gardening on this planet! We do try to demonstrate our most severe issues for you all because we think it’s important to show that even “good” gardeners have their issues. So, we went out and found the four most embarrassing or “worst” things about the current state of our gardens!
First, we do have weed problems that we just haven’t dealt with. For example, our old radish bed was supposed to be cleared out by now and replaced by a bed of greens. But, we haven’t gotten around to it. Heck, we haven’t even removed the radish that we didn’t harvest! The weeds and flowering radish continue to grow, exacerbated by what we think were weed seeds brought in by our commercial compost additions this year. We’ll hopefully get to this soon and we even have the replacement lettuce growing in our greenhouse! But, sometimes we struggle with the amount of time we have and just can’t deal with “all the things” in a timely manner or how we’d planned it.
Second, our tomato harvest has been a disaster this year. It’s late July and we STILL don’t have a single ripe tomato. We had some plant nutrition issues early on with our tomato seedlings that set back our tomato starts by several weeks this year. In most years, we’d be swimming in tomatoes by now. But, this set back has severely impacted our harvest and it’s entirely embarrassing because we’re well versed in growing tomatoes and plant nutrition! We know exactly what went wrong and how it went wrong, but we simply didn’t react quickly enough in the early season to correct it!
Third, we inexplicably lost one of our artichoke this season. We have no idea what went wrong or why it just decided to give up the ghost. Our other artichoke are seemingly fine and have even begun to put on their chokes. But, in this one plant’s case, the leaves just suddenly dried up and here we are. The plant is still holding on and trying to do something, but it will not be giving us an artichoke this year. We usually try to perform some sort of analysis as we use these things to improve our skills, but we’re just mystified with this one.
And lastly, we struggle a LOT with our pepper experimentation. For those that follow us, you know we do a ton of pepper trials as we’re actively trying to find varieties that do well in subarctic climates. A lot of those experiments go wrong! We have at least a dozen pepper plants, right now, that are just not winning this season. Some of these varieties even did well in previous seasons! But, to be on our “tried and true” pepper list, a variety has to produce across multiple seasons, showing its resiliency to seasonal differences. At least three varieties that we previously thought were promising won’t be making it into future trials! Some of it is likely due to our aphid troubles this year (which has largely let up, thank goodness!), but it’s also that this effort is hard!
We always enjoy humbling ourselves in front of you all and we wish other garden channels did it as much as we do! We try to talk about how hard this stuff can be! We know because we’ve been through that learning curve, too! (We’re even still on it!) We also admit that sometimes we’ll use the lens of our cameras to capture what we want. But, we almost never edit photos out of the camera (we don’t have time for that!) and what you’re seeing is what is there.
On the same token, we’re also skilled at growing and have experience across a ton of different plant varieties. We have learned how to solve many of the most common issues! That’s one of the reasons why we run this page, we believe that sharing our skills, thoughts and efforts with you can have a meaningful impact on your gardening! It warms our heart every time you tell us how we’ve helped you and makes it worth all the time and effort we put into it!
So, hopefully this clears up that we are both indeed human and growing on this planet!
