2020 gardening wrap-up

For those who came in late, see:

Gemlog post "Gardening update" (2020-07-15)

Phlog post "Almost square foot gardening"

My gardening for the year has been over for a little while now, driven by two things. First, the housing co-op which owns our apartment building revoked our permission to have the raised beds in the communal outdoor area. We did the right thing by asking first, and there were no objections at the next board meeting (literally nothing happens in Sweden without at least one board meeting somewhere) so we got the go ahead. Apparently after we set things up the board was inundated by requests from other tenants to make use of outdoor area for various personal reasons, to the extent that they couldn't feasibly say yes to everybody and so, in the interests of fairness, they decided to adopt a policy of saying no to everybody, including us retroactively. I am somewhat baffled by this. Were we committing a terrible violation of Swedish social norms by asking for this, with nobody else in the building having had the gall to ask before we did but then once they saw it was possible the floodgates opened? Whatever. We were allowed to keep using our beds until the end of the year, but I kind of lost the emotional investment in them pretty much immediately knowing they weren't going to be around long term. However, as it turned out, we ended up making plans to leave Sweden at the end of October anyway, as to my great surprise I managed to secure a great new job which, for the first time since I graduated almost 10 years ago, is not a temporary, fixed-term contract but is ongoing for as long as they and I am both happy. I'm not looking forward to yet another international move, friggin' *already*, but the prospect of some long-term stability is too much to pass up. So, the garden is gone, the physical beds themselves and even a few plants rehomed to internet strangers, the rest composted. This post, lengthy introduction complete, is supposed to be a wrap-up of what worked, what didn't, and what I learned.

The great success of this year was spinach! Or, more precisely, New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonoides). This is not actually spinach (Spinacia oleracea), but an entirely different plant native to Australia, New Zealand and some parts of Asia, but which looks and tastes enough like spinach that it was extensively used as such by the crew of Captain Cook's Endeavour in colonial times, hence the name. I'm pretty sure we didn't actually realise at the time we bought the seeds that we weren't buying "proper spinach", which we had previously completely failed to grow in Finland. We had hoped that using good commercial potting mix in raised beds might give us better luck than the clay soil we had tried. And we certainly did have much better luck, but whether it was the change of substrate or the change in actual plant, I don't know. Anyway, nine of these plants put in a grid formation within a single square foot cell of the garden grew extremely well, inter-tangling with each other (9 was probably too many!) and spilling over to adjacent cells, getting entwined with neighbouring plants! We planned our square foot beds based simply on how many of each plant could allegedly grow in each cell, and on which plants a companion planting resource online said would or would not work well in neighbouring cells. It turned out this was a bit too simplistic of an outlook and it's important to think about how large plants grow and whether that growth is largely horizontal or vertical, if you don't want to end up with a bit of a mess! In the case of the spinach, though, it didn't seem to actually overwhelm anything, and the harvest was absolutely bountiful. I was using it in lunch salads that I took to work five days a week for weeks, and my wife occasionally used some for her lunch as well, and it just seemed like we were never going to run out! It was the first thing we've grown which has provided some small sense of what it would be like to be at least partially self-sufficient for food via gardening, as opposed to having a handful of nice dinners over the course of a few weeks and nothing more. I also found it really incredible to just pick leaves directly off the plant and drop them right into my lunchbox, without any kind of preparation. Not fruit, or vegetables, which are separate and detachable parts of plants, but the actual immediate plant itself. I know it's a terrible cliche to go on and on about how modern industrial food production has so thoroughly disconnected us from where our food actually comes from, but it really was kind of eye-opening to experience eating a plant so directly.

The great failure of this year was capsicums (bell peppers, paprika, whatever you want to call them) and, to a lesser extent, cherry tomatoes. The plants themselves grew just fine, and seemed very healthy; green, tall, upright and seemingly sturdy. But the capsicums never bore any fruit, and while tomatoes did appear to on the tomato plants, they stayed resolutely green. In retrospect, it was probably somewhere between ambitious and foolish to try to grow these fruits, which prefer hot climates, in the open outdoors in a Nordic land. We transplanted one of the tomato plants to a large pot and brought it inside, keeping it overnight in our bathroom with the underfloor heating turned on and, to my pleasant surprise, tomatoes which had remained stubbornly green for weeks outside began to ripen after a few days and in the end we did actually get a small harvest of tomatoes. But obviously these are strictly greenhouse plants in this part of the world, and it was largely a waste of time and effort to attempt anything else.

Our squash and zucchini performed somewhere in the middle. In Finland, these were our great success stories, and in our final year there we had a bumper crop of gigantic, weapons-grade zucchinis, big as your forearm. We got nothing like that here, but unlike the capsicums and tomatoes we at least got *something*, just not anywhere near as many as previously, nor were they as large. We planted two of each, in a 2x2 section of adjoining cells in the corner of one bed, which turned out not to be a brilliant idea because these are quite large, leafy plants and they definitely began to encroach upon one another, and one actually totally overshadowed the neighbouring eggplant which is probably the reason that plant never really grew much beyond its seedling stage. Toward the end of summer, after we'd already started to harvest zucchini and squash, these plants developed quite a serious problem with powdery mildew, a familiar pest from our days gardening in New Zealand (which is only spared the official title of Mouldiest Place on Earth by virtue of the fact that nobody actually hands out the title). It's possible that poor air circulation due to these plants being all crowded together is to blame for this. We were able to get it somewhat under control with traditional remedies like a milk spray, but by this point it was already clear that we weren't going to get much out of the plants anyway, and we'd already heard from the housing agency that the garden wasn't long for this world, so we were a little lax about the whole thing.

Finally, and on a somewhat more upbeat note, this year I've had a change of heart about flowers. I have always viewed my forays into gardening as being strictly related to my interest in self-sufficiency, so I've only ever wanted to bother with plants which serve some kind of useful purpose, primarily as food, as opposed to "mere ornamentation". But this year my wife claimed one of our square feet for a Zinnia plant, and I'm so glad she did. To my surprise, a single plant produces flowers in multiple different (bright and vibrant!) colours, and the surprise factor of watching a bud develop but not knowing what colour it was going to be until it burst open (and, early on in the whole process, not even knowing which colours were possible contenders!) was a simple but very wholesome and natural delight, and one I'm keen to repeat.

On the whole, this first stab at square foot gardening was not exactly a roaring success, and probably our worst year since moving to this part of the world, but I don't think much of this can be attributed to the square foot method itself. Naivety about the climatic suitability of certain crops explains some of the failures, and planting too many large, leafy plants in adjacent cells probably contributed to some of the others. The things that grew well grew very well, and I suspect that with a better choice of crops and smarter layout we could get the method to work pretty well for us. Time will tell what kind of setups will be practical for us after the move!