Every season comes with its challenges, and there is no gardener on earth who can safely say that their season was perfectly planned and perfectly executed.
Planning comes quite naturally to me. I love to create journals, and garden drawings and layouts. I romanticize the process, I imagine how things will look when in full swing.
But no matter how beautifully laid out my garden is, I always somewhere along the way change my mind about something or other and go off script.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s a mess, and sometimes my plan falls a little short of my whimsical expectations.
As someone who likes to control things, the garden has really taught me to let go and let life happen. No one controls nature and how she wants to grow. We are at her mercy, and this Winter of 2023 was no different.
I made mistakes, dealt with the unexpected, and I was forced to change plans. To keep note of what happened, and maybe to help you next winter, here’s where it went wrong.
It was a warm winter
I can’t control the weather so there’s not much I could have done to change this problem, but I did learn new things.
Here in the Lowveld, our winters are generally mild, but when summer seemed to linger into June, it was unusual to say the least. Things like Broccoli, Cabbage, and Cauliflower are wonderful winter plants that really benefit from the cold. When the warm weather just carried on and on, I had to water more, and I had to battle the bugs, two things I didn’t have to worry about the last two winters.
Prepping beds, letting them rest and placing a thick layer of straw over the beds, helped with the moisture retention, and instead of using my water tank to water the whole garden as I did the previous year, I went back to watering by hand. I also invested in some neem oil for the cutworms and aphids.
I planted in May
Usually, my winter garden is on the go by the start of April. But with that warm weather, I didn’t want to risk my seedlings dying. I potted my seedlings into individual containers and just kept them going until the weather cooled, which was well into May and even then it wasn’t winter cold.
This delay stunted my growth by quite a bit, and while I usually start harvesting Broccoli by the end of July, I have only now, in the middle of August, started getting decent heads.
One thing I did plant in April is my peas, which I direct plant. Almost all of them were eaten up by snails and slugs, and I had to replant the lot.
I watered too often in the evening Â
It might not be the best plan, but I like to grow Baby Marrows in winter. This is mostly because we only eat Marrows in stews, I means, who in the Lowveld wants to eat stew in summer!?Â
Baby Marrows are like magnets for powdery mildew and since I left my watering for the evening, my plants got mildew. I didn’t take action fast enough and it took over my plants, reducing my harvest.
I also had some problems with my tomatoes, but as soon as I switched back to morning watering, the tomatoes regained their health.
I planted cucumbers in a shady spot
Back in March I created a new trellis in my garden. I remember the day clearly, because it was hot, the cicadas were singing and a storm was brewing. As I worked it thundered overhead, and I was fully absorbed in my happy space.
My goal with this new trellis was to plant cucumbers, which I would grow through the winter. I was hoping to be ahead of the coming hot spring, so that I could get a good harvest. What I didn’t realise was that the base of the trellis was in complete shade, and when I planted out my seedlings, they were too small to reach sunlight. It was an epic fail, the cucumbers did nothing and eventually shriveled and died.
I planted Carrots and Beets under my Brocolli
This plan actually started out well… until it didn’t.
In a bid to save space, I planted Carrots and Beets in the same bed that I planned to later on plant my Broccoli. My idea was that by the time the Broccoli seedlings went into the ground, the carrots and beets would have big enough leaves to not be affected by the shade of the Broccoli.
Well, that didn’t happen.
I thought I had planned the timing perfectly, but the Broccoli grew faster than the others and eventually my root veg were shaded.
This isn’t a loss though. Once my Broccoli plants are done, the Carrots and Beets can get a second wind.
