On my reading table this winter: Vegetable Gardening for Dummies

Winter 2011

This winter my reading stack of books includes Vegetable Gardening for Dummies. If you had seen the puny vegetables I grew when we lived in the Seattle area, you might have bought this book for me and insisted I memorize it. I always started out with great expectations and early success. My sugar snap peas grew well, probably because Seattle's cool, wet springs are a pea patch’s heaven. Unfortunately, two of my garden staff’s second favorite vegetable (after tomatoes) is fresh peas.

Every afternoon, Kaylee, our golden retriever, and Rags, our Old English sheepdog, waited impatiently for pea-picking time. As soon as they saw me coming out the back door, holding a red colander, they would race to the garden fence and start panting. Most days I would end up feeding them the peas I’d planned to toss into the pasta for that evening’s dinner. I love to eat fresh, raw peas, too, so very little of my crop seemed to make it as far as the kitchen.

My other vegetable crops were less impressive. (I am stretching the elastic meaning of “crops” so far that, when I let go of the word, it might just shoot backwards and snap me in the face.) The lettuce patch would typically be one day away from picking, for a week of dinner salads, when I would forget to replenish the slug bait around the garden bed. The next morning, I would find only a chewed-off, ragged row of green stems, instead of healthy bibb, buttercrunch and Quatre Saisons lettuce plants. It’s so galling to have to go to the market to buy salad greens, when you know the slugs are passing the bleu cheese dressing around their own dinner table.

I planted corn, beans and cucumbers during one of Seattle infamous false springs: a few days of 70 degree-weather, lasting just long enough to lure impetuous gardeners like me from out of our winter burrow holes. As soon as we planted our seeds, the sunny joke was over, and the cold rains began. My corn seeds never did sprout. Probably the poor little seeds shivered and drowned. A few cucumber plants made it above ground, but languished without sun, turned yellow, and collapsed long before they had even flowered. And the slugs added fresh bean pods to their springtime menu. (I'll wait to tell you about my pumpkin patches over the years, until we’re closer to autumn. There is something to be said for delayed humiliation.)

The pressure to grow vegetables successfully will be greater here in northern Idaho. I won’t be able to blame any crop failures on four months of rainy, cold springtime and three-week summers. In Seattle, only my immediate family and closest friends knew about the vegetable casualties in my garden. This time, I’m writing about it. I will rely on your compassion as you read. This spring my husband, Lee, will build raised beds inn our west yard, and I will fill them with rows of vegetable seeds and young plants. In the meantime, I’m studying “Vegetable Gardening for Dummies” and wondering if gardening here means I won’t have to order a truckload of slug bait.