Pinterest - with a little salt

A year ago I started this blog because I was starting my first garden and wanted to share some of the tips (the good and the bad) I'd learned in my crash course into gardening. Unfortunately, 2018 really kicked my family's butt and this blog was one of the first things to get put on the back-burner. I'm hopeful for 2019 though, and if I can, I'll do more updates. This is exactly how every one of my journal entries starts. lol.

My #1 gardening lesson in 2018 was to take everything you learn on Pinterest with a grain of salt. No, scratch that, take everything you learn on Pinterest with a giant-ass mountain of salt. Here's a recap of the good, the bad, and the ugly. I recommend you have a tall drink with you because this is going to be very salty.

Square-foot Gardening 

My failures here were purely my fault. I assumed square foot gardening was kind of like the dollar store - everything takes a square-foot or less. The issue is, have you been to the dollar store lately? Very few things at the dollar store cost less than a dollar. And it turns out, there are a lot of things in square-foot gardening that takes up more space than a square foot. Read the fine print when you set up your garden space, and if you think you'll be able to grow a thriving tomato plant or pumpkin in a square foot, think again. 

Pumpkins: 

Pinterest told me I could just trim my pumpkin (and other squash-type) plants down to one vine and train it along a lattice to keep the plant contained. And I could! My single vine grew past my 5-foot lattice pretty fast, so I trained it across the top of the other lattice structures in my garden and ended with a single 20-foot pumpkin vine.

"But Gardening Crash Course, that must have yielded a lot of pumpkins, right?" NO! I had dozens of flowers bloom, and fall off the vine without fertilizing, and my garden is right next to a beehive. The issue is, pumpkin plants have male and female flowers. The female flowers have to be fertilized with pollen from a male flower within the span of a couple days, but only during a couple hours each morning or the flower dies and falls off the vine. When all of those flowers are stretched out on one vine over 20 feet, the chances of a bee tapping a male flower, then tapping a female flower in that small window of time are about the same as Bill Cosby starring in another Jello commercial.

I did get one pumpkin and had to build it a hammock because the vine was 5-feet above the ground. That pumpkin grew tremendously because it had the strength of 20 feet of vine feeding it with nutrients. That pumpkin was that vine's only chance of reproducing and what did we do? We baked those seeds and ate them with some salt!

See, I promised you some salt.

Tomatoes:

Aside from trying to grow tomatoes in one square foot, I really screwed up my tomatoes by following this horrible Pinterest advice.  In case you're too lazy to follow that link (or you have a suspicion that all links are a cyber-threat) the gist of the advice is to bury 5-gallon buckets with holes in them. When it's time to water, fill the bucket up and the water will go deep in the soil, causing roots to grow deep, and tomatoes to grow like this guy's nose. 

So I planted 6-7 tomato plants in my 8-square-foot area, with two buckets in the middle of them. I paired that watering technique with this pruning/lattice technique wherein you cut off all non-fruit-producing growth and train your plants up a lattice. 

I watered my tomatoes once in the spring, and maybe twice in the summer. The soil got so saturated from suddenly dumping 10 gallons of water into such a small area. Most of my tomatoes just looked sad, and one thrived - the one that was furthest from the buckets. One major thing I didn't think about was that tomatoes like consistent watering. My tomatoes cracked all over the place because I was either watering way-to-much or I was watering very inconsistently (waiting for the mud to try up a bit before dumping in another 10 gallons). 

I don't know what effect the trimming technique had on my tomato plants, but I think in the future I'm going to let the plants grow the way God wanted them to (through a metal cage).