Thursday

From the Gardening Journals

I'm pretty much giving up on gardening websites, unless they're certified knowledgeable (e.g., Johnny's Selected Seeds). I've gotten all sorts of bad advice from gardening bloggers who, I suspect, crank out script without regard to whether the stuff they write is helpful.

Consider, for instance, my experimentation with vertical gardening. I found quite a few websites that extolled the virtues of growing winter squash on trellising. They said it was a good gardening method for people with limited space and powdery mildew problems, both of which apply to me. I then erected three spots with trellising . . . and had a horrible harvest this year. I couldn't figure out why.

But then I was reading from a truly knowledgeable gardener, Carol Deppe, and it became obvious: winter squash's long vines grow nodes that attach to the ground. The nodes then absorb nutrients for outlying areas of the vine. Without the nodes, the outlying areas die, hence my horrible experiment with trellised winter squash this year. It's frustrating because I have virtually no doubt the gardening bloggers who wrote about growing squash on trellising hadn't actually tried it, but felt it was worthy blogging material anyway.

I could point to other examples as well, but that's Exhibit A.

If you're interested in good gardening advice, get some good books. I've learned a ton from Deppe's The Tao of Vegetable Gardening and The Resilient Gardener. I'd also recommend The Vegetable Gardener's Bible and The Vegetable Gardener's Container Bible. The Deppe books are good reading. The Bibles are more like reference books, at least for me.