This year, in my first mostly successful in-the-ground gardening
endeavor, I planted only vegetables.
This year, in my first mostly successful in-the-ground gardening endeavor, I planted only vegetables.
In fact, to make room for those vegetables, I yanked out a bunch of nasturtiums and hacked back a plant with sage-like leaves and velvety purple flowers. I had had enough problems with seeds germinating that I was determined that nothing would crowd out my veggies.
And, for the first time in my gardening career, my vegetable garden has produced as a respectable vegetable garden should. It helps that I used baby plants and didn’t try to get everything to grow from seed, as I did last year, when nothing grew. And it also helps that I planted crookneck squash and zucchini, which as you’ll read in Keith Muraoka’s column today, is an ego-boosting plant.
Now that I am no longer measuring my gardening success with a countable yield and qualifiers (i.e. “My cherry tomato plant produced two tomatoes, but the plant was inside, in a north-facing window in San Francisco”), my gardening confidence has received a boost. I am now ready to tackle the next gardening challenge: flowers.
I have only ever grown one flower, and that was a sunflower that actually grew from one of the seeds we planted last year. It was pretty, and it got really tall, but looks and height have not been high on my list when trying to garden. I mostly have wanted to plant stuff that I could eat, and if it wasn’t something I could eat, then the other criteria was that it smell good. The sunflower met neither of those, so I tended it, but cared more about the squash I was growing.
Well, now my thinking has shifted. After reading a newspaper article on cottage gardens this weekend, I’ve decided that that will be my next gardening project, and I realize, it’s a big one.
I know a vegetable garden can be attractive if planned out and that plants such as kale and chard can be nice, nutritious accents. And I will still plant the veggies – it’s quite satisfying to make a dinner from what you’ve picked in your back yard. But now what I want is to add to my vegetable garden, to have roses tumbling over the walkway and daffodils popping up here and there and wisteria hanging from a trellis, and everything working together to make a garden that looks effortless and inviting.
Of course, I don’t have a trellis, and there’s really no way the roses could hang over the walkway right now, but I’m not giving up hope. I’m sure that arranging one of these cottage gardens takes a lot of planning. And it probably takes a lot of waiting to get the effect I’m really going for – I don’t imagine this is something that will come to fruition in a season. But it seems like it’s worth the wait.
And I might as well take advantage of the garden space I have. I don’t know how much luck I would have trying to raise a cottage garden inside in a north-facing window in San Francisco.
Colleen Valles is the Lifestyles Editor for South Valley Newspapers. She can be reached at (408) 842-9505 or at cv*****@**********rs.com.