This summer was the first time I tried my hand at gardening and composting. I, lightheartedly, did not have the outcome I was hoping for. The compost is composting so slow and the “garden” looks a bit comical with the amount of wilted cucumber vines all over the place. While I consider it an overall failure, there was a lot of things that I learned that are encouraging me to try again next year.
So what went wrong?
Composting
I decided to try composting for my leaves and kitchen scraps this year. If you are interested in why, check out my blog post here. I purchased a tumbler style and got started right at the beginning of spring. Composting does not happen overnight. While I have read up on how to do it, I think there were elements that I did incorrectly.
Ran out of browns.
When composting, it is important to keep a good balance between greens and browns. For composting to work efficiently, the greens use the browns for energy during the decomposition process. For me, I ran out of browns very early on.
Next year, I will be sure to save a pile of leaves next to my composter for me to always be able to add in the proper amounts.
Too Dry
Composting requires it be kept damp. If it gets too dry, the bacteria you need dies which halts the process.
I need to have a schedule of checking it every few days to see if I need to add water. While I added water when I added additional browns and greens, the time in between was left unwatered. With how dry it got this summer, I am pretty sure I have killed off the bacteria multiple times.
While the greens and browns will eventually fully decompose, my mistakes will lead to it taking longer. Because I do not have a large area for multiple compost piles, this will halt my ability to continue to compost more as time goes on. I still look forward to trying again next spring.
Gardening
In the raised bed, I planted strawberries, cucumbers, carrots, sage, chives, and mint. It was incredibly fun to do. The strawberries and mint were purchased as small plants, the rest were from seeds. Let’s dive into what I did wrong.
Overseeding
While I do have houseplants, I still don’t really consider myself someone who has a green thumb. I get by on luck and it still surprises me that some of my plants are still alive. That being said, when I went to plant the garden, I just assumed I would screw up the germination process with the seeds and decided to plant way too many seeds in a small area. I just assumed a quarter of what I would plant would actually grow. I was wrong. Specifically, this was the issue with my carrots and my cucumbers. They were so squished together and were fighting for nutrients. I believe this lead to my carrots being incredibly tiny and my cucumbers giving up on life about half way through their growth. Next year, I will actually use what is recommended for spacing on seeds.
Cucumber Trellis
I knew that I wanted to plant my cucumbers the furthest back in the raised bed so that I could have them grow up a trellis. I decided to do two rows of cucumbers and this actually caused a lot of chaos. The row more in front was not liking having to grow over the other ones and would often just start growing in random directions. This lead to them wrapping around everything else in my raised bed. It was a bit of a mess.
Next year, I will just do a single line of seeds for the cucumbers for the trellis, to keep things more organized.
So Much Mint
I wouldn’t consider my mint to be a full failure, but I feel it is important to point out. Mint is incredibly invasive. I used a recommendation from someone to plant the whole growth pot it came in right into the raised bed. This would keep it from spreading across the entire raised bed. It was a great tip. It definitely helped. I will say, in looking through my raised bed, I did still find small sprouts of mint growing outside of the pot. So while it does help, it doesn’t completely negate the possibility of it spreading.
Next year, I will continue to pot it in it’s own pot again .I will also plant a smaller amount because I didn’t use nearly as much as I thought I would.
Too organized
I wanted to make sure my raised bed didn’t just have one single item in it. I knew this wasn’t good for the soil and I wanted to ensure not too much of any nutrient was being pulled from the soil. That being said, I didn’t plant much of a chaos garden. A chaos garden is often described as taking a random group of seeds and just spreading them out over an area to grow. I took each type of plant and planted them in groups all around the soil. The more I thought about this, the more I became curious if doing the chaos garden would have been more successful.
Next year, I am testing this theory. This year I had been worried I wouldn’t know what was what. However, now I realize that really won’t be an issue. I will be planting things more at random within my raised bed to ensure no nutrients would be taken too much out of a single area. I will be interested to see if my plants do better next year.
Planted too late
I did plant my seeds way too late. The reason I did this is because I was unsure where to store the germinating plants in my home given my lighting situation. I do not get a lot of well lit areas in my house due to the positions of the windows. I also could not put the germinating seeds outside too early in the spring because it is too cold.
Next year, I will have a growth station for my germinating seeds inside. I am in the process of determining the best thing to do with all my outdoor plants through the winter and I am considering getting a few growth lamps for that to store them in my basement. I hope to use those same lamps to help give my seeds light in the early spring as well.
Overall, it was a fun experience and I do feel like I failed forward in my organic gardening skills. I have a long way to go, but I am glad I did a small garden. There were some things that I did that I will continue to do. That includes doing small amounts of different types of plants, planting flowers next to my garden for pollinators, and just learning so much about how plants work. I purchased a few recommended secondhand books that I will continue to keep to reference and learn from each year.
What have been your successes or failures in the garden? Any tips you would like to share?
