Veg Gardens: My Rant Against Them

Like so many other gardeners, I got into the design field many years ago by way of my own real veg garden.  Returning to DC from four years in London and two in NYC, we bought a house with a yard big enough to grow vegetables.  I double dug the sunniest corner of the yard by hand, and I was in business. 

That first year, I grew tomatoes, pole beans, cukes, zucchini, lettuce, herbs, peppers of many types, cantaloupes and even small watermelons.  I was in heaven.

Over the next several years, I battled squash borers every year and finally gave up on zucchini.  My blueberry bushes never really took off in DC (really, too hot for them here). Too hot for rhubarb, too.  The lettuce, of course, bolted every late spring (or earlierl) because of the heat. You could have taken bets, almost, on how early the lettuce would take off. 

The cantaloupes never really had time enough to develop fully.  I never had enough room for all the lima beans I wanted.  Ditto the eggplant. Other kinds of squash seemed to take up too much room.  Asparagus was out of the question, and after a year's trial with strawberries, I decided I needed a real farm for a crop like that.  I did enjoy my trials of different tomatoes, and discovered many old heirlooms that I still seek out every summer. 

Then, my big silver maple came down in a storm, so I was forced into re-doing the back yard.  My veg garden ended up in the middle.  It's pictured above, in early spring, just after the leaf mulch was put in place.  I gave up on tomatoes when the neighborhood squirrels decided to take a huge bite out of each one just before it ripened.  I got tired of the lettuce bolting and the sparse numbers of beans and peppers.  

And yes, I did try row covers to keep the critters out.  I hated the look of them, so off they came, and back came the problems.

So now I have an herb garden, with great crops of sorrel (and plenty to make soups and sauces from early spring to late fall). dill, parsley, rosemary, tarragon, mint, oregano, thyme and all the other usual suspects. I still pine sometimes for my tomato plants, but I can buy whatever I want at the local farmer's market, and enough of them to freeze for the winter.  No more veg gardening for me; I leave it to the expert local farmers, who obviously know what they're doing.

Comments

[Martha]

Oh, growing vegetables isn't practical. It has to be a hobby.

We grow veggies because it is good exercise and we get enough of a few things to preserve or share with the feed-the-transients kitchen down the road.

But, I'm with you. Most veggies do not produce the way they are advertised. Most people do not have the time to take on such a physically demanding hobby.

Buying at the farmer's market is a virtue that should be valued as highly as wanting to be the person digging in the dirt.

[Cheryl Corson]

I was so charmed by the eggplants growing in large ornamental pots along the Dumbarton Oaks swimming pool in 1994. Likewise, the herb parterre in front of the Library of Congress in 1995. In urban environments, mixing rogue edibles in with high society ornamentals works. And yes, squirrels took one bite out of each of my 4th floor fire escape tomatoes back in 1999.

[Liisa]

What a relief - someone else like me... The media seem to be full of articles about how everybody's growing vegetables worth hundreds of dollars make me feel like failure; mine dry out during my vacations, and 'wildlife' eats most of the rest. I do have green fingers otherwise, but somehow just don't manage growing veggies, so I'm completely out of sync with the gardening trends for the moment!