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Back in May I wrote about how busy I was with various things, such as the garden and some volunteer work. Well, I got overwhelmed with it all as the business kept building and my wife decided we should take a vacation (she was right – and I deeply appreciated the time off – but back home things were piling up and showing the neglect. By the time I would get home at night, it was too dark to garden and I was too tired to try.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa

Make no mistake … that is “my” garden. My wife and I tend to share chores on a fairly casual basis … I do laundry fairly often – she leaves before I do on Monday morning so she takes the refuse bin out / I bring it in at the end of the day. That sort of thing. But the garden is ‘mine’.

And I failed it miserably this year. I’ve never had a year when the garden did not produce enough to eat, preserve, sell and give away and still have some rot. But this year there was hardly enough to bother picking.

Something … I don’t know what … ate the grapes. All of them. The only thing that did at all well was the broccoli. The beans were shameful. The tomatoes pitiful. The rosemary did okay, with one good-looking plant, one looking pretty beleaguered. I brought them both in a couple of days ago and the better of the two is really liking it’s new perch on top of my desk. The other one seems to be greening up a bit but it’s too soon to tell if it’s going to be okay. (edit: 11/18/08: the second plant turned out to be tarragon and, while the top is still pretty scraggly, it has sent up 3 new shoots. All, it seems, is not lost.)

Man, I really shanked it this year. I’ve NEVER had such a mangy looking garden … not even my very first! It’s like the law of averages kicked in this year to make up for 25 years of great gardens. Usually my garden looks like a miniature garden of Eden, but this year it ended the season looking like modern day Babylon.

And it was all my fault. It couldn’t have been more my fault if my name was Adam.

A Changed Man Emerges

I have resolved not to allow this to happen again. Parts of my soil … the parts that got enough water and compost … look really, really good — they would pass for premium bagged soil. But some of it looks more like the grey clay I started off with years ago. I didn’t get compost to it as I should have and I didn’t keep it watered, either. When your base soil is technically clay, this really matters. Earthworms have a tough enough time tunneling through clay, but if you keep it moist and full of organic material, they will make the effort. This year, the earthworms were forced into a lot of detours in my garden. It’s not their fault: they don’t have jack hammers. Or hands.

In  the spirit of contrition, remorse and symbolic restitution, I’m going to give vermicomposting a try. I have two and a half HUGE* compost bins started outside, but I’m going to end up with quite a bit more leaf litter than can fit in the last of them, so I think I’ll stockpile a few bags of it in the garage and let the worms have their fun over the winter, munching on the leaves and kitchen scraps. They’ll be safely sheltered in my basement (I hope they don’t mind the sound of the table saw too much) so, as long as the furnace holds out, they’ll be safe from freezing.

I ‘salted’ the outdoors compost piles with nitrogen-bearing material and gave them a good soaking last week because there were too many leaves and too little nitrogen going into them. I think that they should cook down nicely over the winter. Once they get a cap of snow, they tend to reach some amazing temps … the only time I ever actually checked the temperature in the winter it was 180° F in the pile and 0° F. outside of it. I was totally stunned at that … I would have been happy to see anything over 32° F.

*4′ diameter x 4′ tall … the maximum you should build a pile in the city. After this size the decomposition ‘goes aerobic’ and things get stinky.