Flowers, Part 2

During any regular growing season, our market garden is full. The growing season during 2022 was anything but regular. We were to grow our regular vegetables along with flowers for the mid-summer wedding. We had a challenge ahead of us…just how were we to fit all the regular vegetables in the garden and find more growing space for the flowers?

Serendipity #1: Flowers require much less space to grow, for the most part, than vegetables. Having grown mostly vegetables for many years, we were used to the spacing required. We have a spreadsheet that lists how many can fit in our 30” wide beds based on the spacing required between plants. Luckily the thought bubbled up that flowers are different from vegetables, reference materials were perused, and the first crisis was abated.

Serendipity #2: We were able to add 9 new beds to the garden of which only five were needed for flowers. The other four were planted in winter squash, pumpkins, melons, and basil. The new beds used for vegetables were amended with compost due to the high nutritional needs of those plants.

Serendipity #3: The beds used for flowers did not need amendments. Flowers do need fertile soil but the ones we grew would do well with the fertility already in the market garden soil. Most of these new beds were carved out of spaces in the garden currently unused but that had at some point previously been used and received amendments.

Serendipity was a powerful ally of logistics. Weather, on the other hand, was not. Spring weather in 2022 was the ultimate, “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody ever seems to do anything about it.” Most transplanting occurs between the last third of May and the first half of June. During May 2022, 9.09 inches of rain fell. The temperatures went from mid-fifties for lows and mid-seventies for highs at the beginning of the month to daily temperatures from mid-sixties for lows and mid-eighties for highs, both above average. May was wet with mild temperatures then wet with above average temperatures. For purposes of planting a garden, it was challenging but nothing to compare to June which gave us weather whiplash. By the second week of June the temperatures were above average with decent precipitation, followed by August in June: first high temperature in the 90s on the 13th and no measurable precipitation from the 14th through the 22nd. We were all stressed.

Amazingly, few if any flowers were lost to this blitz. We did lose some vegetable transplants attributed to legginess caused by our inability to plant due to the weather. Finally the plants were where they needed to be and now we would watch and wait…..and tend.

July 13, 2022