I have to laugh...
I've spent the past 8 years fighting a losing battle with Mother Nature. Ever since I left the sprawl that is the greater Los Angeles area for Northern Utah, I've been attempting to include fruits in my garden. Strawberries, peaches, and pears for the most part. And because an incredibly short growing season hasn't been enough of a challenge, I'm living on the bench of the Oquirrh Mountains - incredibly lousy dirt.
In the course of my battle, I've tried many different tactics: growing in containers, growing in raised planting beds, supplementing the soil, cold frames, frost covers, different fertilizers, fish heads when I plant ...the list goes on and on. The bottom line is that the yields are low and nothing survives for multiple seasons regardless of what I do to preserve the plants and trees.
After my latest failure (too much rain this spring, so all my newly-planted peach trees died from root fungus and black leaf despite my efforts to save them), I pulled out pencil and paper to do some figuring. And I figured out that after all the time and money I've spent fighting Mother Nature's crazy weather in this region, I'd be better off to buy my fruit at the local market and preserve it via pressure canning (my better half and I are pretty good at the canning thing). You would think I would have figured that out long before know. Yeah, sometimes being bull-headed works against me.
Long story short, I'm now shifting my gardening strategy to focusing on root and hardier veggies: carrots, potatoes, zucchini, squash, watermelons. I'm buying my fruits at the local markets, canning them up, then stacking them high and deep.
Why am I sharing this story? Two reasons: 1) I figured y'all might get a laugh, or at least a smile, out of my thick-headed stubbornness, and 2) maybe somebody out there needs the takeaway that you sometimes have to accept your limitations and adapt.
Anybody else brave enough to share similar gardening failures?
I've spent the past 8 years fighting a losing battle with Mother Nature. Ever since I left the sprawl that is the greater Los Angeles area for Northern Utah, I've been attempting to include fruits in my garden. Strawberries, peaches, and pears for the most part. And because an incredibly short growing season hasn't been enough of a challenge, I'm living on the bench of the Oquirrh Mountains - incredibly lousy dirt.
In the course of my battle, I've tried many different tactics: growing in containers, growing in raised planting beds, supplementing the soil, cold frames, frost covers, different fertilizers, fish heads when I plant ...the list goes on and on. The bottom line is that the yields are low and nothing survives for multiple seasons regardless of what I do to preserve the plants and trees.
After my latest failure (too much rain this spring, so all my newly-planted peach trees died from root fungus and black leaf despite my efforts to save them), I pulled out pencil and paper to do some figuring. And I figured out that after all the time and money I've spent fighting Mother Nature's crazy weather in this region, I'd be better off to buy my fruit at the local market and preserve it via pressure canning (my better half and I are pretty good at the canning thing). You would think I would have figured that out long before know. Yeah, sometimes being bull-headed works against me.
Long story short, I'm now shifting my gardening strategy to focusing on root and hardier veggies: carrots, potatoes, zucchini, squash, watermelons. I'm buying my fruits at the local markets, canning them up, then stacking them high and deep.
Why am I sharing this story? Two reasons: 1) I figured y'all might get a laugh, or at least a smile, out of my thick-headed stubbornness, and 2) maybe somebody out there needs the takeaway that you sometimes have to accept your limitations and adapt.
Anybody else brave enough to share similar gardening failures?