Roger's Garden

Since he seems unlikely to post on it himself, I thought I'd turn to Roger's vegetable garden--hardly as thrilling, to our average reader, as more details on a future wedding, but still worth talking about.

Roger has become a phenomenal gardener over the past two years. Not only has he planted a whole new landscape design, he has also built the only vegetable garden in any front yard in our neighborhood of 85 houses or so. He has become, as a result, the subject of much neighborly attention, most of it apparently enthusiastic. The elderly woman across the street who likes to watch the world out her window comments on how often and how hard he works; someone we don't know donated her unused irrigation system supplies when she saw his in action; everyone who walks by stops and looks--more than they do at the nicely landscaped yard across the street. I'm sure when the zucchinis come along we'll have lots of takers.

Roger is just through a bout of jury duty, where he noted the difficulty of making conversation with a group of people you don't know when you are forbidden to talk about the only thing you have in common--the case. One woman told him she was a gardener, admitting to lettuce and tomatoes. Roger gallantly resisted saying the he grew those, plus beans and peas, swiss chard and spinach, carrots, beets, cabbage, peppers (three kinds), onions, corn and, most gloriously of all from my perspective, potatoes.

The eccentricity of this lot works in our favor there since gardens in Connecticut are very prone to the terrible blight of the potato beetle. Most vegetable gardeners I know won't try potatoes because the beetles move on to other hosts once they have eaten your potatoes up. They have an interesting life cycle, living underground over the winter and then going walkabout in the spring to find themselves a good meal. One extension service I read said that rotating crops will do no good unless you can rotate to a spot more than a mile away. So I go out every morning fully prepared to find them but so far so good--something has made a few little holes in the leaves but the plants are very vigorous (they are the front in the top picture) and we can expect a good crop.

Roger, in addition to being unusual, is a kindly gardener who lets volunteers grow undisturbed--so we have a potato in the middle of the swiss chard, several tomato plants at various points, and a forest of sunflowers. I doubt the tomatoes will breed true--they were probably the kind of hybrids (F1), that revert to the parental types when allowed to breed. But it's worth waiting and seeing.

The only current crop in an edible state is the snow peas which are rather spindly--some grew well and some just lay about. Fortunately the pole beans, another great favorite of mine, are marching vigorously along. You can see the sad peas in the front and the happy beans in the back of the trellis picture.