Good Eats

In addition to helping out at the rooftop garden at the Y, I've also been doing some container gardening on our own patios. Scott only claims interest in plants that are edible (although he's broken his own decree by the recent addition of a second maple tree... theoretically edible, I suppose, if we tried to tap it.) In any regard, let's just say that in this year's crop, there were both hits and misses.

A big miss was the squash plants which, while prolific with growth and flowering, failed to produce a single squash. Almost as bad was the onions and shallots, but I admit I messed those up pretty badly by planting them upside-down. Yep, I felt pretty stupid about that.

After a couple tries in the cold spring, the basil took off, and similarly, the rest of our herbs flourished - chives, cilantro, lavender and two varieties each of mint, parsley and oregano.

The tomatoes are, of course, the best. I also played with a few root vegetables, with a small (literally) measure of success. Here's me last night with our tiny harvest of beets and carrots -


Next year the strawberries and rhubarb should be developed enough to produce edible fruit, and along with those we'll take a few lessons learned this year to choose and plant for next.