Gardening Disasters
Y and I are new to gardening successfully. Very new. In fact, most everything I’ve ever tried to grow has pretty much died.
I’ve always said that I have a “black thumb,” but I’ve come to realize that a black thumb comes from being excessively lazy and forgetting to water. While I haven’t cured my excessive laziness, I have found a solution: it’s a drip watering system, which is on a timer. Hallelujah!
And yet, we still have some things going wrong.
The first disaster is a little experiment I did.
See this area of our back yard? It’s all deck and no dirt. As a result, it’s kind of unfriendly looking. Looking online for a solution a few months ago, I was inspired by an article I found online about growing lettuce vertically in rain gutters.
I decided to try it for myself and was very excited when my lettuce started to sprout.
And then everything died.
I’m not sure if I drilled too many holes in the bottom of each gutter or what, but the dirt dried out. And with it, my sproutlings dried out. The gutters also started to sag. Note to self: when trying this again, buy the stainless steel gutters instead of the plastic ones.
Not a pretty sight, is it? Even Lulu is trying to avoid looking.
You may be wondering what’s up with the wood strip above the top gutter. That’s Y’s attempt to save us from poisoning after we realized (too late) that the wood along the top of the fence is treated lumber, and that mature lettuce would be touching it.
So, my little experiment was a complete failure. I am undaunted, though–I’ll probably go get stainless steel gutters and try again.
Our other failure is with the radishes I planted. See that tangled mess on the right? Yeah, those are radishes. They’re tall, skinny, flowering and all over the place.
This wouldn’t be so bad, if not for the way the roots turned out.
Yeah. That looks nothing like a radish. I have no idea what went wrong.
I bit the root, and it DOES taste like radish, but it’s really “woody” tasting, which leads me to believe that they’re actually past their prime picking stage. That red part is sitting above the ground too.
Ugh. Any ideas? My thought is to pull them all out and plant more lettuce.