My Summer 2022 Garden

In the spring of 2022, I had a burning hole in my heart. My desire to play video games all day had dwindled; I desperately needed something else to do, maybe even something productive. Then I had an idea: Since 2020, I've grown one mammoth sunflower every year. I start the seedling inside in the spring (just watering it and repotting it as necessary), transplanting it once it's warm enough outside, at which point it mostly takes care of itself. What if, to fill this burning hole, I started some plants that didn't take care of themselves? So I went to the store, bought some seeds (and seeds from fruits in the refrigerator), and used trash (old bottles, Lunchable trays, cardboard cartons) as starter pots. Great! All I needed now was space to transplant them outside...

On the left is first a photo of my garden the day of transplanting my seedlings, and then a photo about a month after transplanting. In the frontmost box (visible in the second photo) is three sunflowers. They're a variety that grows side buds, resulting in multiple flowers per plant. The middle sunflower ended up dying of transplant shock, and I ended up taking it out. In the bed behind that, I have two sweetie tomato plants (the two on the left) and a tomato plant from a cherry tomato seed (on the right). The leftmost sweetie tomato lost all of its leaves to transplant shock but eventually recovered. In the next row, I planted lettuce, sweet basil, collard greens, and garlic chives. Placing these shorter plants behind my relatively tall tomato plants was a bad call; they ended up growing very slowly. 

The smaller of the back two beds has four summer squash plants. The two evidently larger plants (not visible in the first photo) were directly sown into the soil of the bed, while the other two were grown indoors first. As it turns out, directly sowing zucchini plants (summer squash are a zucchini variety) is ideal, as they have feeder roots that sink deep into the soil for lots of their nutrients. The larger bed behind that one has one directly sown zucchini plant in the center, two mammoth sunflower plants (which I ended up transplanting elsewhere), collard greens, a bell pepper plant, chamomile, and onions. The bell pepper plant required a covering to retain enough heat to grow, which I did not properly upkeep, resulting in no peppers. The chamomile grew like weeds, snaking through the zucchini leaves and growing very well. Also, the flowerpots in the very front have garlic and teardrop tomatoes. 

In the one-month photo, the garden still looks nicely spaced! However, I didn't realize just how large zucchini plants could get. As can be seen in the next photo, things look very overgrown. Furthermore, my zucchini plants have powdery mildew. The summer began beautiful and very sunny, but ended with almost constant rain, leaving the leaves moist and susceptible. Another oversight of mine was the size of those frontmost sunflowers. They ended up blocking most of the light to my tomato plants! Despite my many oversights, I got some hefty zucchinis, delicious tomatoes, and plenty of fresh lettuce, basil, collard greens, and garlic chives throughout the summer. In a separate planter, dubbed the Christy Planter (as it was gifted to me by my Aunt Christy), I also grew lemon thyme, parsley, some flowers, and more chamomile, lettuce, and collard greens.