“Oh, fiddlesticks! Another dratted hornworm has eaten a plant. How exceedingly grumpy I am.”
You’d correctly guess these were not my exact words as I plucked the corpulent caterpillar from the stick formerly known as a lush jalepeño pepper, but they’re close enough for this article.
当我把这只幼虫送进鸡笼时,我感到一种可以理解的幸灾乐祸——就像今年夏天我发现的其他所有幼虫一样。在阳光的照射下,我看到在一片褐色的西葫芦叶子的对面,有各种各样的南瓜虫在乱窜。如果我眯起眼睛,穿过草地,看到秋天种下的大头菜开始扎堆,我发现我的一只鸭子正在对我的韭菜下手。把她从剩下的小疙瘩上吓跑后,我叹了口气,开始把水管连到雨桶上——过去一周都没下雨了,花园开始显得紧张起来。
Though it may sound so, this is no list of complaints. Perhaps I could just as easily write about the overwintered kale that produced lush greens well before anything I planted in the spring, or the gorgeously smooth beets that grew larger than the packet said they would, but you’ve seen those photos in every gardening book and read those humblebrags online all summer.
相反,在这篇文章中,我想谈谈那些不能上instagram的花园日子。失败的种植,无果的努力,以及满是害虫的产品,味道很好,但肯定不是咖啡桌的材料。因为这是一种现实的园艺——我们大多数人都经历过的那种。正如你可能知道的,每一篮美丽的馈赠,往往也有枯萎的藤蔓。
What do you do with the inevitable failures? Make the most of them! Here are some hopeful ways to turn the frustration into motivation and education. And after each section, I’ve listed a potential remedy to the situation.
Figuring Out the Reasons
If you really want to learn how to garden, or to eventually be self-sufficient, the worst thing you can do with failure is to simply declare yourself a black thumb and call it a day. And don’t resort to hanging over the fence, seething with private jealousy over your neighbor’s unfairly lush veggies, allowing comparison to steal every ounce of joy from your efforts. Instead, put on your detective hat and see if you can find out the reasons for your underwhelming garden. Here are some common mistakes or problems that may have befallen your food plot … maybe the reason you’re looking for is here.
Timing Troubles
植物想要生长,但它们想要在它们准备好的时候生长。如果你在生长的一年中仔细观察一片荒野,你会看到随着季节的变化,各种各样的花和草在其中穿梭。它们完全适合在自己的最佳时间生长,而且它们几乎被留给自己在适当的时刻生长。
但是有了花园,我们就有了一个人造的环境。我们,园丁,播下种子,从土壤中开始,有时我们会因为过度热心的园艺或无知而错过时机。例如,我在宅地的第一年,我兴奋地在四月种下秋葵种子。这些可怜的小东西尽职地发芽了,但在春天的寒冷中挣扎,永远长不到一英尺高。整整一个半月后,我重新种下的种子(在秋葵喜欢的酷热中)茁壮成长。
其他植物对日照长度非常敏感。例如,中国的长豇豆只有在夏至后才开始开花结荚。早点种植,它们很可能会发芽,然后停止生长,直到白昼变短,它们可以继续生长。
结论:如果植物似乎在生长或结果停滞,也许你应该怀疑它们是在错误的时间种植的。
Remedy it with keeping a garden journal.
This is probably one of the more useful tools when it comes to knowing and growing your own food. Carefully recording what plants went where, when they were planted, and how they performed will give you a rich log of information to draw from when analyzing your successes and failures.
My garden journal is nothing fancy — a 3-ring binder with diagrams of the gardens to show where I planted different plants, and a log where I note every garden activity on a near daily basis. That log is probably the most important. I keep track of the day I planted every seed, and then, based on whether they grew well or not, I can try to decide if that was the right timing for my specific climate.
If you suspect a plant failed due to being planted at the wrong time of year, note it down. Then, do some further research into cultivating that specific plant, and see if planting it a month earlier or later would make a world of difference.
New Garden Nuisances
如果你从零开始经营一个花园,很有可能头几年的收成不佳。阅读任何早期自耕农、拓荒者或返乡者的描述。在几乎所有的情况下,他们都会与他们刚刚建立的粮食种植地的微薄收成有关。把一片野生草地变成一个超级高产的有机花园不是一朝一夕的事情。
Bottom line: New gardens rarely, if ever, thrive to full capacity in their first few years.
Remedy it with patience, and maybe some raised beds.
Keep working at your garden. It will, after several elbow-greased seasons, come into its own. Keep adding compost, removing rocks, rotating crops, pulling out that stubborn grass and morning-glory, and eventually, you will start seeing real results, promise. Hang in there!
If you want to give yourself an encouraging boost in a productive direction, you can also try building some raised beds. They can give you well-shaped carrots, big beets, and perfect parsnips before you’ve gotten the soil in a new garden worked to a satisfying consistency.
Soil Chemistry Concerns
Why are those squash plants so small? Why are those leaves yellow-streaked? Why did my tomato make such huge, beautiful leaves and no fruit? And what in the world is causing those crispy, brown edges on the beet leaves? The soil’s chemistry may be the hitch in your gardening step. Certain nutrients or elements may be lacking or overabundant, and when plants don’t get what they need in terms of nutrition, boy do they show it.
Bottom line: Underproductive plants may be lacking essential nutrients or have a toxic overload of a single nutrient.
Remedy it with learning more about your specific soil and the specific requirements of the plants you want to put there.
You can send soil samples to be analyzed by your local university extension. You can also make a more old-fashioned assessment of your plants,and take a good look at their leaves — they’re a decent deficiency declaration.
Most soil problems can be slowly amended with consistent seasonal application of compost. If you detect a specific problem, however, you can sometimes give the soil a boost in the right direction with specific soil amendments.Wood ashes from untreated wood can boost potassium and lime.A careful sprinkling of borax can solve a boron deficiency.骨粉能增加磷和钙。An abundance of nitrogen — such as that found naturally from a seasonal application of manure — makes huge leaves in some plants. This is great news for plants that we grow for leaves, but not so much for plants that we grow for fruit. Nitrogen actually stunts fruit bud formation. You may have found that out the hard way.
Does keeping this straight make your head spin? Try not to be overwhelmed. It’s super unlikely that you will have all these problems simultaneously.And there’s ample soil-building resources here on Insteading to bookmark and reference if a weird situation raises its head … er, leaf.
Too Much (or Too Little) TLC
One inch of mulch? You lavished five. You water those plants with motherly affection every morning and night. You’ve sprinkled abundant fertilizer. You’ve given them above and beyond what the packages and books said! And that overly thick layer of attention may have resulted in plants that are positively underwhelming or dying.
Conversely, you may have remembered that you haven’t weeded or watered in a month. Oops!
Bottom line: Just as too little attention will obviously hurt your plants, too much attention may hurt them as well.
Particularly for you patio and container gardeners,know the signs of overwatering— rotting roots, yellowed leaves, and floppy, dying plants. Sometimes, though it may feel wrong to the new, attentive gardener, plants need to dry out before you water them again.
Mulch piled too thickly can also be detrimental to plant growth. It can stop rainwater from reaching the roots or cutting off oxygen supply, and provide a hiding place for gnawing voles to secretly destroy your shrubs and trees.Know what a mulch volcano is … and don’t make one.
虽然我希望我不需要解释太多,但一个被忽视的花园会表现得像预期的那样好(不是很好)。单是牧草竞争就会把花园中的水分和养分吸走,尤其是葱属植物不能忍受这种竞争。所以,试着把在花园里散步纳入你的日常日程。任何一个看不见的花园都很容易让人忘记。
Shockingly Weird Weather
That out-of-the-blue May snowstorm? It had more long-term effects than hindering your morning commute. Your garden may remember it for far longer. Strange, sudden changes in temperature canshock young garden plants,especially new transplants, potentially stunting their growth for the entire season.
Bottom line: An unexpected shock can rob plants of peak productivity.
Remedy it with cold frames, leaf mulch, or row covers.
Obviously, some freak storms can’t be anticipated. But, if you get the tip-off that a strange temperature fluctuation is imminent, help your new plants through with some protection. You may have to run out in twilight with an old bedsheet to cover tender seedlings, toss handfuls of dry leaves, or get all fancy with some store-bought cloches. Pretty much any cover can help forestall disaster.顺便说一下,我们这里有一篇关于防冻的文章。
Heat waves are a little harder to manage, but you can give those fall planted seedlings a helping hand by planting them on a cloudy day and providing some shade during the most direct sunlight. I’ve used fallen branches (with leaves still attached) as a super low-cost sun shade.
Pest Problems
如果你的园艺是有机的,那么你个人就会明白,试图与那些意图吃你的食物植物的生物进行非化学战争是一个挑战。如果你每年都在同样的土地上种植同样的植物,你就放弃了自己的主场优势。害虫经常在土壤中越冬,如果它们从冬眠中醒来,最喜欢的食物正等着它们,它们可以在这个季节得到不必要的启动。
Bottom line: Planting the same plants in the same place year-after-year will lead to a buildup in pest populations.
(Partly) remedy it with crop rotation.
Remember your garden journal? It’s also a great way to keep track of what was planted where so you can rotate your garden beds every year. And I hope you know this isn’t just moving specific vegetables, but rotating plant families. Get familiar with knowing which plants are nightshades, brassicas, legumes, cucurbits, alliums and so on, and plant a different family group in the beds every year. By mixing up which family of plants are in a bed every season, the pest population can’t build up as easily.
这种方法只是众多方法中的一种,但在你规划花园时,它是一种重要的实践。
Inexplicable Failure
也许你的花园化学是理想的,你的耕地是令人垂涎的,你像专业人士一样管理害虫。那么你放在这个天堂里的新植物还是死了。有时候,事情就是这样。不是每一种植物都能在每个花园生长。
结论:有些种植注定要失败。
Remedy it with trying a different variety, planting something better suited to your climate, or focusing on the next season’s planting.
在短季种植区的园丁们都知道,有些植物没有足够的时间在他们的种植区生长。Thankfully, other northern gardeners have developed quite a few varieties of popular garden plants that race to maturity, giving you the best chance to haul in a harvest.除了我给出的链接之外,你还需要做一些挖掘和研究,但你可能会找到一个适合你的品种。
Gardeners in growing zones with long, hot growing seasons, on the other hand, know that there are some cold-loving plants that are out of our league. For example, I really, really wanted to grow rhubarb on my homestead. But after complete failure, and a little more research into what rhubarb actually wants, I realized that my patch of the Ozarks gets too darn hot for the poor thing to survive. So, I scrapped my rhubarb hopes and focused, instead,想在这里种植什么,比如喜热的瓜,秋葵和豇豆。
Finally, if (for whatever reason) the spring planting was a bust, call your losses and focus on summer planting. Likewise, if the summer planting is just a big inexplicable nothingburger, turn your attention to fall planting. And if the fall planting gets frozen before it had a chance to thrive, mulch it well and dream of the spring. The nice thing about a garden is that you always have a chance to start over.
Sometimes, There’s Just a Bad Year
I’ll be honest with you all. This year, I’ve had the worst tomato harvest of my entire gardening life. Confidence shaken, I visited our local farmers market to stock up on what I couldn’t grow. There, one of the farmers confided in me that he didn’t bother with growing outdoor tomatoes. The luscious red fruits in his stand were all greenhouse grown. Curiosity piqued, I found similar stories from every vendor. As I continued my investigation over the next weeks, I heard stories of low yields and strange, out-of-the-ordinary problems with nearly every gardener I spoke with.
总的来说,我们不知道具体发生了什么。但在我看来,这些问题普遍存在的事实表明,一些环境层面的因素正在影响我们的农作物。四月反常的暴风雪是罪魁祸首吗?异常温暖的冬天?水里有什么东西吗?附近工厂的化学物质影响了空气吗?我可能永远不会知道。
底线:不是每件事都是你的错。
用“尝试,再尝试”来补救。
An unproductive year happens every generation. Glance through the annals of history, and you’ll see plenty of unavoidable crop failures that broke the backs of Republics or sent waves of famine through a land.Consider the Krakatoa eruption of 1815. Farmers in the American south had to contend with July frosts because of the ash cloud.
So what do you do? Lick your wounds, and plant again with hope for the next season or next year.
振作起来!
One of the most encouraging lines I’ve ever read in a gardening book was an offhand comment about how to fit fall crops in the summer garden. In the fantastic bookRoot Cellaring, Nancy Bubel mentions she transplants seedlings into rows where an earlier planting is finished … or failed! Being able to hear a gardener that I respect admit that sometimes she has unsuccessful garden forays as well? It gave me a welcome sigh of relief, and at least for that day, I was a little less hard on myself when surveying my food plot.
所以,勇敢的耕耘者、除草者、敢于冒险的播种者和护土者,要坚持下去。每一次失败都是一次机会,让你学会下次如何做得更好。有了花园,四季的无尽循环每年都会给你一个全新的开始——加上每年两次的春季和秋季作物——弥补了现实的园艺。
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