Blurred vision and stealth edibles
21.08.2023 - 12:02
/ theunconventionalgardener.com
/ Emma Doughty
My parents are coming to visit today, to ‘see the garden’ (which is probably just a convenient excuse for them to visit). I am a little apprehensive – not least because it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop raining all day. We were going to have a barbecue; we’ve thought better of it.
Last weekend we filled the rest of the existing raised beds (there are 6 – when the garden is complete there will be 12). In my impatience to have things in the beds and growing, I decided to transplant some overcrowded tomato and courgette plants from their crates. Unfortunately it had been a dry few days, and they were wilting from drought.
What I should have done was water them thoroughly and wait for them to perk up. Of course, that’s not what I did do – I ploughed ahead and pulled them up and unceremoniously planted them anyway. Root disturbance on top of water stress is not a recipe for a happy plant. One of the courgettes died pretty quickly, the other two remained on the critical list for days. One is now fully recovered and growing again, whilst the other still looks unhappy. The tomatoes are doing an interesting mixture of looking very unhappy and perfectly content at the same time. It helped that – although I planted them out on a hot and dry day – the weather has been overcast and wet ever since.
Since then I have filled two more of the beds with new perennial edibles (more on those soon), leaving one bed empty and waiting for asparagus plants. We’ve brought some of the container plants back from the refugee camp, but not all of them. It’s a garden in progress, and the current set of planting is more a question of convenience and necessity than planning.
It certainly doesn’t represent the vision I have in my head for the garden,
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