Amateur mistake #1: composting seeds. Last season, I spoke of the rookie compost mistake we made- composting mostly green materials- and its disasterous results. This year we discovered yet another rookie composting mistake- composting seeds. We ended up with dozens and dozens of seedlings in our compost bin, and were not quite sure what exactly they were. So we decided to take a few, put them in the garden and see what they would become. A few got shocked and died off, and one took root. And is now taking over the earth. The husband and I are still trying to determine exactly what it is. Could be acorn squash, might be pumpkin, but I'm guessing it's cantaloupe. Despite numerous attempts to trim it back, it's still taking up about a quarter of our garden. This weekend we are going to see what we can do to tame it and hopefully keep it from taking over any other plants (current casualties of Godzilla plant: 2 jalapeno plants, 1 dwarf pumpkin plant.
Amateur mistake #2: Not caging the tomato plants from the get-go. I knew tomato plants needed cages, I just never got around to doing it! But with all the sun we have had lately, the tomato plant has had immense growth in the last week or so. A few days ago, it practically imploded from the weight of all the tomatoes. So it finally became do-or-die. The husband and I just spent about 45 minutes wrestling with some cages, and I think we successfully have all the tomatoes up off the ground. Phew.
Our next issue to tackle, aside from taming Godzilla plant is to figure out how to keep the friendly neighborhood ground squirrel from treating our garden like his own personal buffet.
Tomato casualties to date:
Ground squirrel: 3
Wresting tomato cages into place: 12 (d'oh!)
Two kids' curious hands: 10
And yet, we still have plenty tomatoes on the plant that will hopefully mature.
And even with all these hiccups, we are still enjoying garden fresh veggies several times a week.
