Gardening Winners and Losers

• • Spaghetti Squash. It may have been the variety I had, but this squash seemed particularly vulnerable to the ‘wilting’ disease. The vines produced few fruits, which I myself do not find appetizing.

• • Japanese Eggplants. This variety is supposedly more suitable to our climate and features an edible skin that isn’t plant leather; however, it’s quite finicky and seemed to take every moment to bitch in it’s own plant way whenever something changed. Two things really turned me off of this variety. First, every plant wilted horribly when transplanted from peat to soil, but unlike every other plant, they also wilted just as bad when the peat was just put directly into soil. Secondly, they wilted immediately when their pot was put into the ground. Why? Did the temperature change five friggin degrees? The jury is still out of fruit production, but the way these things are I don’t know if they’ll last long enough to produce any.

• • Cilantro. This spice has given me sketchy germination, which stinks all the more since it requires quite a bit of it to make any Mexican dishes; and a giant bunch of it is 80 cents down at the Indian market, so why bother.

• • Okra. This plant grew great, especially given the late start I gave it. However, the fruit require constant supervision as they would routinely grow from ‘too small to eat’ to ‘wood pulp’ huge in the matter of a day or two. As well, like cilantro it just takes too much okra to make a dish so I’d have to reserve a whole plot for it, but I just don’t like okra that much. It’s too easy to buy a big block of it frozen.

• • Pumpkins. Takes up too much room for something that is largely inedible. Although less so than the spaghetti squash, I was sweating that a season worth of growing was going to go nowhere due to the wilting and squash fungus diseases that the pumpkins were susceptible to.

• • Beans. I might still try to make them work, but it takes a bit too much effort to harvest them, and too many have to be grown for meaningful use.

• • Spinach. Bolts (goes to seed) way too quick

• Summer Squash. Yuck.

Winners:

• • Acorn Squash. The winner of the winter squash round up. Small size, great taste, nice tasting seeds too. If this plant has one fault, it’s that it’s imperviousness to the regular squash diseases meant a bumper crop of squashes, far more than I’d care to eat over a five year span, let alone a season.

• • Zucchini. It never got the wilting disease despite sharing space with other sick plants, and although it got the powerdry mildew-fungus stuff that seemingly all squash plants get, it sluffed it off and kept producing tons of great zukes. I’ve planted two this season in full sun, and that will be zuke enough (even with one we had to give them away at times!)

• • Pepper plants. They never seem to be a good price, so it was great to go out and find peppers on the plants. The grew great despite being started late.

• • Peas. Fresh peas taste great, and the plants this season didn’t even care about an occasional frost.

• • Basil. Slow to germinate, but quick to grow, this spice is great to have on hand for Italian dishes or, since I grew the Asian variety as well, fried rice. (The only caveat I present is that some of the seeds seemed to be ‘off hybrid’ or something since some of the plants smelled and tasted like basil, but didn’t really look like it).

• • ‘American’ Eggplants. These traditional eggplant plants grew in hardly any soil and sported great production. The only issue was finding sufficient dishes to use them in.

• Tomatoes. Last year I grew seventy tomato plants and netted a ton (figuratively, barely) of tomatoes. This year I’m down to two dozen and the plants have yet again shown great resiliency at being transplanted, over-watered, under-watered, cooked, frozen, etc.

Indifferent:

• Root Veggies. Onions, turnips and, potatoes aren’t all that hard to grow, but they take forever to do so