Singing The Gardening Blues, What to Do When Your Crops Fail

             What a weird year for gardening. What a horrible spring we had.   How about those grasshoppers.  Listening to other gardeners around the country bitch about what failed in their gardens this year, with much talk of crops that were stunted or unfruitful, or up and plain disappeared over night, makes one wonder what is afoot. Throughout the years, in my own garden, tomatoes blackened and died with early blight, despite fungicide and copper sprays.  Those that survived, six weeks later fell to late blight. Cucumber plants grew to only one or two leaves, and only one cucumber, just barely two inches long . The asparagus crop was non-existent.  Peach trees that one year before had been over laden with delicious juicy ripe peaches, turned up their noses, and refused to produce. Half-runner beans reached a miserable height of eighteen inches sporting tiny, hard, inedible green beans.  Even the honeysuckle over the arbor refused to bloom.  The only tomatoes that grew vigorous plants and tasty tomatoes were a Russian tomato called Mars, and a dozen or so healthy looking volunteers that sprouted out of my compost heap whose variety one could only guess at.

                On the other hand, the scarlet runner beans, red currants, strawberries and raspberries outdid themselves. So, to what entity do we blame for the crop failures. Is it lack of pollinating honey bees? Could it be soil configuration? Possibly the strange spring weather? Without wasting time researching for the cause of the problem, my own remedy is to simply pass it off as a freak of nature, a strange year for gardening, and go on to try again next year.  One can only look to those things that did well, and the hope that next year will be better.

                I figured out that part of it could my fault. Had I paid more attention to those things in the garden that might have needed my attention, would those crops been more successful?  Maybe, maybe not.  I thought I did all the right things, fertilized at the right times, weeded, watered, cultured and coddled.  Having pulled up all the blackened withered vines, and eaten a few miserable beans from the half-runners, thoughts of turning the vegetable patch into a swimming pool crossed my mind.  Out of this dismal failure of a gardening season, in a spot where in previous years these same items had thrived vigorously and produced bountifully, I can relate to you those plants that did do well.  Dahlias will seemingly grow anywhere, as long as you are able to keep the slugs away.  The English favorite, scarlet runner beans not only will keep on producing until November, in milder climes will also produce tubers and will return by themselves year after year.  Most berry bushes, especially the blackberry will thrive with very little care, and the only attention that my heavily loaded strawberry bed gets is an annual haircut with a weed whacker each fall.

                What lesson do we learn from all this? In gardening there is no correct way, and no foolproof method to produce bountiful crops. We lie at the mercy of the wind, the rain, the soil, and the sun. I presume it is “nature’s way,” and forget about singing the gardening blues, just get over it, nothing is perfect, and who wants perfection anyway?