The Sorry Gardener

So I’m in the throes of a passionate love affair with my veggies. As Mr. Sorry often tells me, “When you’re in, you’re all in—with your neighbor’s money.” And that’s how it appears to be with veggies this year.

I just hope the neighbors are well invested, because I decided to gamble on tomatoes, despite the especially cool and rainy Pacific Northwest spring that may be harbinger for the same kind of summer. Even our good summers are so short and relatively cool that tomatoes are a crapshoot.

It’s on my bucket list to grow a tomato from seed someday, but for now I buy my starts two feet tall (preferably with blooms). This year I’m also planting them in black bottomless pots to radiate maximum heat, and I’m babying them from the rain under plastic hoops. Since I’m usually a “keep it simple” girl, that much intervention creates a pretty skinny line between “growing” a tomato and “manufacturing” one. But summer wouldn’t be summer without a succulent “home-manufactured” Sungold. So I’m throwing down with two of those, a Yellow Plum, and, of course, a Brandywine. I also wanted to try a Green Zebra this year, and I still might. It would fit nicely in the spot where the basil is failing to germinate. That’s another plant I can only reliably grow from starts.

While we’re talking seed loss, my Green Lake and French bush beans didn’t much appreciate my cocky impatience when I planted them in the cold, soggy beds a month ago. In protest, they turned to mush so completely that I couldn’t even find them when I sifted through the soil to confirm lack of germination. But the Royal Burgundy bush beans planted at the same time (April 23) have germinated quite nicely despite weeks of exposure to the cold and rain. They literally shot up a couple of inches yesterday after being under the row cover with the tomatoes for two days.
In other news, I finally pulled the overwintered Sparkler radishes. Most of them were skinny, deformed little things instead of round balls. And it’s not lost on me that the largest of them had the longest tap root. I will be certain to firm them into the ground much better than when I scattered these into the winds on a fluke last October. So now we have a couple of radishes to tide us over for salads until the spring-planted Cherry Belles are ready to eat in a few days.

I also picked one of my Pak Choi for chicken garlic stirfry last night. I haven’t grown Pak Choi before (these are from starts), and I wasn’t sure when to harvest. But the slugs are beating them up, and when I cut up the one for dinner, the flower head was just starting to form inside, so it’s time to eat them up before they bolt. Good timing anyway, as I have some Renee’s stirfry mix planted from seed that will probably be ready to eat in the next week or so. And that’s shaping up to be a lot of stirfry.