The midseason potager report

It feels funny to say “midseason” at the top of August. The shadows are getting longer, sunsets are notably earlier, NFL pre-season starts in two days ... by all appearances Fall will come knocking in no time. On the other hand, I haven’t even gotten my first full-size tomato yet and there’s a lot of growing season left ... depending on choices made. So I wanted to stop and take inventory of how things are going and what’s yet to come.

I basically have three categories of foods growing in my “minimal”/makeshift vegetable garden this year — there’s the fruit garden, the leafy greens and the nightshades — so let’s look at it that way:

THE FRUIT GARDEN

I’m extremely happy with my decision to add a half-barrel to the mix and give it and the little raised bed over to acid-loving fruit plants — even though it has made the entrance to the garden a little chaotic looking. That’s due to the necessity of the stakes and bird netting that have been protecting the berries from the birds and others who’d like to have them all for themselves. In addition to how messy it looks, I can’t deal with the fact that we’ve had to help two freaked-out chipmunks who got their claws caught in the net, so I will figure out something else next year. Meanwhile, the netting has been removed.

Notes on the occupants:

• Highbush blueberries ‘Duke’ and ‘Nelson’: The advice was to remove any berries from the nursery plants and let them concentrate on roots this year, but I couldn’t! I’m happy for the handful of berries we were able to harvest from the two plants, and look forward to more next year. With them done fruiting, we removed the netting, as noted. Both varieties were delicious, but they ripened at the same time, despite the plant profiles, so we’ll see if they stagger next year.

• Strawberries ‘Earliglow’ and ‘Sparkle’: Removing the netting means the strawberries, which are planted beneath both blueberry bushes, are now exposed — but I heard the other day that you can ripen them on the counter like tomatoes! So I’m planning to pick the full-sized, unripe ones each day and see if that works out. So far we’re finding the Earliglows tastier than the Sparkles, but the Sparkle plants (in the barrel) are the more productive, so it’s a toss-up.

• Pear ‘Seckel’: This little bare-root stick has sprouted only a few teensy leaves so far, and they don’t look all that pleased. I suspect it’s because the bottom of the bed is filled with cardboard, sticks, decomposing leaves, etc., and we’ve had a lot of rain the past few weeks. So it would probably like better drainage at its roots. Hopefully it will bear with me this season and be happier next year. I honestly forget it’s there, it’s such a spindle, but everything will be so dramatically different in future years if/when it becomes an actual pear tree at the garden entrance.

• Borage: Not a fruit, but also planted in the raised bed. The flowers were really pretty, and I’ve eaten the most delicious borage quiche in the past, but I read that you have to be really careful about eating the leaves, and mine bolted pretty quickly. I don’t think I’ll plant it again — although it’s such a vigorous self-seeder I’ll likely have volunteers for years.

• Kale: Likewise in the raised bed, but see below.

THE LEAFY GREENS & HERBS

• Lettuces: We’ve talked about my lettuce pot on the stoop. Those three heads produced for me, in cut-and-come-again fashion, for a couple of months before bolting. (Again, I attribute this to morning sun and afternoon shade.) I’ve now pulled them from the pot, top-dressed it with compost, and will be seeding more arugula and three frost-tolerant lettuce varieties: ‘Red Sails,’ ‘Marvel of Four Seasons’ and ‘Buttercrunch.’ (Yes, I should have sowed the seeds a few weeks before the others bolted. It’s fine. We have kale to fill the gap!)

• Kales: I planted four kale plants in the raised bed, unsure how they would feel about the acid-lovers’ soil mix I had worked into that bed. They could not be happier! They came from a seedling four-pack of unidentified varieties, just marked “kale all-stars,” and I can confirm that’s accurate. We eat a LOT of kale, the two of us, so I pick an armload of giant leaves off these four plants multiple times a week, and they are still going strong. But in the adjacent space where the borage has been, I’m about to sow another kale seed mix. I also have some kale ‘Winterbor,’ a past favorite, in a small terra cotta bowl where it is being less productive, so I may move it in here as well.

• Herbs: I have mint, thyme, basil and flat-leaf parsley scattered around. In proper rectangular veg beds, my method is always to just intersperse and underplant them with the tomatoes. While the pots limit that a bit, I do like being able to put mint right into a tomato pot where it is both contained and off-putting to the deer. My basil is doing a bit poorly, though, planted in with one of the struggling tomatoes, see below.

• Borage: see above.

THE NIGHTSHADES

I will say this on repeat forever: a vegetable garden doesn’t have to be pretty to be productive. In my current case, the least pretty part of the makeshift kitchen garden is this ragtag collection of pots sitting in the driveway until I come up with a better containment system for next year. (Last year’s Driveway Potager report is here, and future thinking here.) But while I don’t blame the containers for being Pinterest-unworthy, I am going to blame some of them for plant performance:

• Cherry tomato ‘Sungold’: Always the most reliable performer, mine is struggling this season. It does tend to surge later, but I’ve had only a handful of tomatoes off it so far, and it’s in pretty meager shape. I was dubious about trying to grow tomatoes in these grow bags — I just don’t think they’re deep enough — but last year’s Sungold plant did not care. This year’s is likely struggling due to drainage, which is the thing I dislike most about the bags. It’s difficult when hand-watering not to make Bag O’ Mud, as I like to say, but when five inches of rain falls, it’s unavoidable. So this will def be my last year attempting tomatoes in these.

• Tomato ‘Damsel’: Same goes for this full-size tomato I haven’t grown before that I brought home by accident. It’s made only two undersized tomatoes so far, and I pulled one of them off the vine to ripen on the counter yesterday as it was cracking from the Bag O’ Mud situation. I think I’m going to pull this plant, puncture the pot(s) around the bottom, and seed it with bunching scallions (‘Tokyo Long White’) and Mizuna mustard instead, both of which are reportedly frost tolerant.

• Cherry tomato ‘Purple Bumblebee’: This one, which I’ve not grown before, is in a bigger, taller pot and doing beautifully. It produces miniature heirloom tomatoes (large for cherry tomatoes), red with darker striping, which are quite dense! I think they’ll be perfect for roasting and freezing, and hope it will kick out quite a lot of them between now and the first frost.

• Ground cherries: Ugh, so frustrating. I’ve noted before that the chipmunks LOVE ground cherries and snatch them up the instant they drop. I had hoped planting more plants might mean we would get some, but the opposite is proving true. The plants are absolutely laden with unripe fruit (despite being under attack from beetles) but unlike tomatoes, ground cherries have to ripen on the plant, and you can’t eat them until they do so and fall off. So as much as I love them, and love the chipmunks even more, I won’t probably won’t plant them again.

• Pepper ‘Pippin’s Golden Honey’: Another new-to-me variety, this plant is in another of the cloth pots and doing ... ok. Just now starting to make peppers, so I’ll report back when we’ve eaten one!

• Fava beans: Not a nightshade, but a bonus plant in the pepper pot. I had left a shoot or two of the favas from late winter/early spring, which died off but produced new shoots, despite the heat. And to my amazement there are now blooms on the new growth. You just never know!

If you made it all the way through this, I hope you found it useful! Happy to answer any questions in the comments—

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p.s. Special thanks to my friend Jill Draper, master gardener and yarn dyer extraordinaire, for snapping that top photo exactly as I saw it in my mind.