Happy New Year! As festivities wind down and we enter the holiday hangovers and doldrums of January, now feels a great time to look back on a last reflection of 2024, the teachings it gave, and the takeaways gained before the neck creaks back forward and sights are set on 2025.
Sprinkled around this past year were spontaneous thoughts I chaotically transcribed and stored in random places. Some were written as small notes jotted my phone, some were scribbled in a dirty gardening journal kept at the plot, and yet some notions still rattle around in the back my head, yet to be codified into words. After a period of pondering the last few days, I’ve culled and organized a list of my most important personal musings I plan on taking into the year ahead. They are not in any particular order nor rank of importance. Enjoy!
Warning: Gore ahead.
Ok I lied above about order and rank for this first one. After some noggin scratching and a few spins in my chair, it dawned on me that this musing is in fact the most important musing and thus worthy to be listed first.
If you’re not careful with sharp objects then you very well could hurt yourself. Or worse yet, slip and fall and stab yourself, dying a painful agonizing death writhing in the dirt and perhaps more importantly ruining the serenity that other gardeners try to enjoy nearby.
Exhibit A: The Crime Scene
Hori-Hori knives are fantastic tools. They are also sharp as ****, complete with both a straight and serrated edge. Throughout the season I used this knife to dig holes in the dirt, cut bamboo, measure soil depths, and forcibly poke through and open tough plastic bags with my hand directly in the blade’s trajectory. You can see evidence of this last use case above in a picture I prefer to title as “Aaron’s organic wood staining”. What the picture truly portrays though is my dedication to blogging. As my sliced open gaping finger rapidly and continuously blotched the bark chips below, my initial thought was how incredible the opportunity was laid out before me to pictorially document for a future blog post. You’re welcome.
Exhibit B: The Intervention
The main reason I’m attracted to Morgan is both her internal/external beauty. The 2nd reason is her utility as a “human vet” for any potential situation where I may slice my finger open with Hori-Hori knives. I just knew deep down in my gut that I’d be able to cash in on the 2nd reason at some point. She informed me that I could either go to the ER and spend lots of money and time, or take a swig of Jack Daniels and let her handle it. It was a tough call, but in the end I was happy with my choice. The finger has since healed, but I think there’s a bit of lingering nerve damage unfortunately. Oh well.
Folks, I leave you with one last tidbit before musing #1 concludes. I preface this tidbit with emphasis on the musing’s title; specifically the phrase don’t be Dull. The operation and recovery made me sharper and more in-tune in the garden. However, ‘sharper’ isn’t synonymous with ‘sharp’, it’s synonymous with ‘less dull’. You see, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. My Hori-Hori knife is. It again reminded me who is boss.
Exhibit C: Learn or Die
I debated putting this section into musing #1 to prevent shame, but I must document everything like the gallant garden blogger I aim to be. You know what they say; fool me twice shame on you, fool me thrice shame on me. Or something like that 👀
Let my experience be your reminder to keep your tools sharp, but your mind sharper.
It’s hard to label gardening as anything other than rewarding. Sure there are waves of disappointment when a certain plant get diseased, or critters get to your yields before you do. Even when these events happen valuable insights are often gained. There’s only one situation that I found myself feeling completely deflated. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed I’d make my way to my garden beds for a quick check up, only to be met with the sight of a collapsed trellis and my lovely healthy plants spread across the ground with snapped vines and popped out roots.
Every trellis I built collapsed this past year at least once. Now technically in a sense this was planned failure. Having a local source of bamboo at the house enabled me to attempt building trellises only using natural materials. I even chose to use twine to complete the aesthetic. This did satisfy my curiosity, but a part of me knew at the outset that the whole DIY bamboo operation would eventually encounter some kind a stress test. The onus was on me to protect the plants and I consciously chose danger.
When opting for bamboo structures, here is one tip. Use bamboo for smaller, more specific tasks. I lashed smaller bamboo stakes together to support individual blueberry canes and it worked surprisingly well.
I also used smaller bamboo stakes to support some of my heavier fruits as they reached maturity.
Winter squash was a great example where bamboo supports kept them off the ground as they continued to harden and really fatten up.
Sometimes just putting stakes over one of the beds allowed fruits to avoid contact with the soil, thereby minimizing rot, disease and blemishing.
My trellises collapsed for a culmination of reasons that can be partially blamed on bad design. Not having a background in structural engineering, I had to follow my gut on crafting each trellis.
Another reason for collapse was from using twine. Just like an inexperienced criminal under interrogation, twine breaks under enough pressure. Two of my trellis collapsing events were attributed to this. In the future I will use synthetic reusable string for lashing posts or bamboo together.
Finally, when opting to use bamboo, it’s better to air on the side of caution and add more support than what seems necessary at the outset. It’s difficult to reinforce a trellis mid-season when plants are already bombarding it. Bamboo is resilient and flexible, but everything has its threshold, and heavier plants will conquer bamboo like child’s play. In fact, after one collapse, I went back to the drawing board and beefed it up with a totally cured and solid sunflower stalk that you couldn’t even bend if you tried. This is what it looked like after a few weeks on my tomato trellis:
The moral of the story is; plants get heavy. Plants get heavier with fruit. Plants get heavier with rain. Therefore you must bring out heavy-weight supports. As much as I like the aesthetic of bamboo trellises and twine, I like properly supported plants that don’t collapse even more. Vertical trellising version 2 will look quite a bit different in my beds for 2025.
Let’s do an exercise.
How many summer squash (zucchini) are visible on this plant?
1? 2? Maybe a 3rd one poking out? The correct answer is roughly 13 billion. Were you close? Perhaps you just can’t see them very well because they’re camouflaged so well in the foliage.
If there was one kind of crop to stay on top of, it’s the kind that yields a lot, and quickly. Every gardener knows the risks that come with neglecting a summer squash plant or a snap bean plant for too long. Before you know it you’re hauling wheelbarrows worth of gigantic inedible vegetables home and dumping them straight into the compost.
There were a few moments this past season when this happened, but I feel these moments can be reduced with one simple trick; Grow. Colorful. Varieties.
The more visible the variety, the less camouflaged it becomes, the more likely I am to notice and pick it, the less overwhelmed I feel, the more useful the yield. You can see what I’m getting at.
This is one aspect of why growing from seed is so fun. Nowadays there’s a litany of fun varieties available to choose from, and many of them aren’t green 😱 I’m not anti-green by any means, but from now on if it’s on my list to grow something with a reputation of high and rapid yields, I want to pick early and I want to pick often. That means the easier they are to spot when they’re small, the better they can be managed.
No gardener has everything figured out which is what makes it so stimulating. I enjoy reading books and articles on the latest and greatest gardening tactics, but like any hobby it’s ultimately an adventure of discovery unique to the individual. Even if it’s ‘common knowledge’ that spacing your starts X inches apart is most optimal, there’s still likely a lingering inkling in the back of the mind to seek out that truth in the dirt rather than the pages of a book.
That’s where I come to my 4th and final musing to takeaway into 2025 which is to make space for experimentation. Or put another way, ‘mess around’. As a software engineer by trade, I’m predisposed to treat my plants like widgets in a factory, gazing down upon fully optimized beds, inputting ratios into my TI-83 calculator to evaluate peak efficiencies and outputs. This year I will fight these tendencies further and add more ‘art’ to the science.
The inspiration for this stems from everything that performed poorly this past year. The onions, the potatoes, the cilantro, etc. I could throw identical mud at the wall and hope for a different result, but that ideology leaves less of a spectrum to learn from.
Maybe experimenting involves transplanting similar starts at different times when the soil is different temperatures.
Maybe experimentation is watering the same variety of carrots at different cadences to see how prone they are to splitting.
Maybe experimenting involves variably spacing groups of onions or amending the same onions with different fertilizers to see how they respond.
Or maybe experimenting even manifests after harvests are had; tweaking pickle brines, dehydrating different vegetable recipes, or processing different foods like crafting kimchi from radishes or creating sauerkraut from cabbage.
Experimentation propagates imagination and fosters the practice of observation. I left this musing for last because the idea really could be channeled into any path a gardener desires, both large and small.
Stay curious!
2024 was a fantastic year in my gardening journey, but perhaps the main highlight of 2024 was starting this blog. This writing thing originated as a small and spontaneous twinkling of an idea, and having no clue whether or not I would stick to it I’m proud to say that 18 blog posts were written over this past year. Looking back I’m thankful to have put in the effort to document plot 63p’s activities and I look forward to continuing this vocation into the year ahead.
Alas, this is where we depart from 2024’s history and turn the page into 2025’s future. Thanks to everyone who tuned in thus far as it’s a major part of what keeps me going! Now let’s forge ahead into a new year of growth.
-AA
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