It’s A Small Garden Spot But…
In the 3 foot space between my house and a walkway, right next to the pool equipment, I have my vegetable garden. The area is perhaps 12 feet long and I practice vegetable garden “over planting.” This is an experiment of mine that sometimes backfires but is sometimes successful. If you’re wondering what over planting is, I basically just crowd things. I plant tall things in the middle of short things, and the short things.. like lettuce, I plant the heck out of.
As you know, growing lettuce is one of my loves so in any spare spot. I put lettuce seeds in.. lots of them. I like to get the mescalin blend seed packs because you never know whats going to come up. Lettuce surprises me with it’s hardiness. It seems like such a delicate plant but it can withstand a lot. My most recent experiment I started in November. I devoted about 5 feet in length to a whole packet of mixed lettuce seeds. I was overrrun by green arugula to the point that I couldn’t eat it anymore.. I thought that underneath I could see other lettuces trying to grow but they were overcome by the arugula. It was big and grew so fast! I felt gypped with my seeds. One day.. I just flat pulled up all the arugula. An amazing thing happened, all the lettuce that had been stunted and under the arugula.. took off!
Now that part of the garden is prolific with leaf lettuce, curly lettuce, red and green romaine lettuce. and a beautiful red/green cabbage like plant that is two and a half feet tall and 3 feet in diameter. I don’t know what it is but is is downright ornamental.
The other half of the area, I plant with a “crop” of something. Green Beans is a favorite and we harvested the last of those in January. Now, I’ve crowded in 6 broccoli plants that are doing great. There’s also a tomato plant growing amidst the lettuce with a volunteer cantaloupe that came up right next to the tomato plant. I had a pepper plant in there as well but it was terribly stunted by the arugula so I removed it and put is in the earth box where it could get some sun. I water everything with my hydroponic solution and the experiment seems to work great. There is always fresh lettuce, soon to be broccoli and the tomato and the cantaloupe are blooming.
The obsession part of it is I go out and just stare at everything at least 3 times per day. I get teased a lot about this but, I just have to know.. is it too dry? Did the rain hurt anything? Omg.. there is frost on the neighbors yard.. is my garden okay? I water I nurture and at dinner time, I pluck.
It’s just too amazing to miss.