Vegetable garden has its successes, failures

It’s time for your garden columnist to ‘fess up; it’s time for my annual roundup of successes and failures in the vegetable garden. Looking back, I’d rate the growing season as above average for most crops. We seemed to have just enough rain in my area to keep things going, along with plenty of heat to ripen even the fussiest crops.

Peas have been a frustration to me over the years. Either my sowing technique or the soil in which I grow them has always given disappointing germination. Typically I have had to invest a half pound or more of seed just to get a 30-foot row. But now all that has changed.

I’m here to report that peas transplant beautifully. Last spring (April 3), I started sugar snaps and Oregon sugar pod II snow peas in plastic seedling trays under fluorescent lights. Every pea germinated in the peat-lite mix (similar to Pro-mix) I used, and the seedlings grew steadily and sturdily for two weeks in a cool greenhouse (they could have been grown outdoors). Following a short hardening off, the seedlings were popped into the garden on April 20, and they took off instantly. Perfect spacing produced a bountious crop by the fourth of July.

The biggest failure of my garden, as usual, were the peppers and eggplants, both of which produced vigorous top growth but few fruits. Especially dismal were the Anaheim peppers I tried from Pinetree Garden seeds. They are supposed to make excellent green chiles, but mine merely reached for the sky and made a few spindly peppers late in the summer. I’ve asked various successful pepper growers what they think my problem could be, and the most likely answer seems to be overfertilization. Next year I’ll skip the fertilizer altogether and see how I do.

Johnny’s Selected Seeds of Albion introduced a new Brussels sprout this year called Widgeon. The quality and flavor of the sprouts is absolutely tops. Too bad I forgot to pinch the tops out of the plants in mid-September, which forces the sprouts to fatten up.

Dorasol is a pale green-fleshed European melon carried by Pinetree Garden Seeds. It is every bit as early and productive as the catalog claims, but this year its fruits were not particularly appetizing, at least compared with all the zesty orange fleshed melons I grew.

Johnny’s pole bean Nor’easter is super vigorous and produced many flat podded beans. I tried growing them as transplants too, and had very poor results. Half the transplants died and the other half took three weeks to resume growth. The flavor of the beans is good but they do get tough rather quickly.

A neighbor, who has grown potatoes a good deal longer than I have, informed me that my recommendation of the new Canadian variety Shepody was overrated. I have come to agree with him, in that the highly productive spuds don’t store all that well, and their flavor is not on a par with Kennebec or Green Mountain. Nevertheless I grew a big crop of Shepody this year on a closer spacing (8 inches between seed pieces), which produced fewer oversized tubers. Next year I plan to go back to Kennebec as a main crop.

I tried a new sweetcorn from Stokes called Flavor King. The stalks were twice as tall as a man, most with two ears. Flavor was good but not what I would call royal.

I encourage any readers who had unusual successes or failures with new vegetables to drop me a line. If I get enough responses, I’ll devote a column to your experiences.

Michael Zuck of Bangor is a horticulturist and the NEWS garden columnist. Send inquiries to him at 2106 Essex St., Bangor, Maine 04401.