3 Ways I Messed Up in the Garden, Plus Garlic Scapes, Purple Basils, Flowers, Herbs, and More

🌱There's so much going on in the garden. Including 3 big oversights on my part. Sigh. And yet many exciting things are growing too!

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As we saw last time with the weed invasion, there’s no shortage of ways to be humbled in the garden. Even after a lifetime of experience! I have 3 major ways I’ve messed up this time, which I’m happy to share with you. Thankfully, it’s still more than worth the journey. And there are so many beautiful crops ripening too, which we’ll see down below.

Here’s a photo of a beautiful ‘Peaches and Cream’ honeysuckle bloom to start us off right. I’m so excited to see it start to flower now in its second year! (It’s not easy to wait so long for perennials to bloom. But it’s so rewarding when they do!) The blooms are deeply fragrant, with notes of vanilla, citrus, fresh linens, and spring breezes. And this variety has some good mildew resistance, which is important when growing honeysuckle.

‘Peaches and Cream’ honeysuckle

My ‘Major Wheeler’ honeysuckle, also in its second year, should hopefully bloom soon too. It’s a red variety with nearly full mildew resistance, which is fantastic and difficult to find in a honeysuckle.

Nearly all of the flowers I grow (with a few exceptions like morning glories and sweet peas) are edible. I’m looking forward to doing some posts with flowers I have yet to use in the kitchen. I have a lot of new ones this year.

Ok, now onto the less exciting but important lesson stuff. Here are 3 ways I’ve messed up in the garden this year with notes on how I need to do better:

🚫3 ways I’ve messed up in the garden this year:

Without further ado, please don’t do what I’ve done below:

🪲1. Not being vigilant for insect damage

‘Darkmar 21’ brussels sprout leaves with insect damage

It’s been way too easy to coast on the immense relief that the planting is done. I’ve been working on the weeding when I can, but I haven’t been checking for insect pressure at all. And this is what can happen. All of the brassicas I’ve planted this spring (broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collards, and kale) have been reduced to lace. And I’ve found the culprits: cabbage worms, cabbage loopers, and small brown grasshoppers.

I have organic controls like neem oil and Bt (bacillus thuringiensis), which I should have been using preventively, along with floating row cover, interplanting with herbs, and hand-picking the insects. I’d thought that doing proper crop rotation might buy me some time and less need to watch for damage. But nope. It’s probably too late to save these crops this time, but I can do a cursory application of Bt just to try. I’m just glad I’ll be trying some of these crops again in the fall. Lesson learned! Ugh.

🦔2. Not watching for rodent damage

A safely-captured groundhog in the veggie garden

This groundhog is so cute. I was really sad to have to capture (in a humane Havahart trap) and relocate him. But he had dug a gigantic burrow in one of my veggie beds, and he’s eaten almost all of my crops in it. And there may be more in the family, so I still have 2 traps set. If there are more of them, I’ll make sure to release them in the same place. (We went 14 miles away so they don’t find their way back.)

Poor guy. And he was inside of the fence we’d built around the bed to keep them out! Clearly these guys have skills. If I’d been watching, I would have been able to capture and move him before he had eaten all of those wonderful crops. I could have sustained much less damage if I’d been out there watching more often. But I’m heartened that he had some really good heirloom veggie meals.

🌰3. Killing my seeds even with decades of experience

fall seeds planted under my grow lights with low germination

Here’s one of 8 flats that I’ve seeded under my grow lights for a fall succession planting. It was already hard to cut back from using all 24 flats that will fit under my lights. I’m trying hard to reduce my workload to preserve both my time and my sanity.

But even my reduced fall planting plan didn’t stop me from being careless with my grow light setup. There are so many factors to stay on top of with grow lights. But I’ve been using them since I was a kid, and I think my rush made me careless.

I have T5 grow light fixtures, which I bought 11 years ago and are now really outdated. They emit much more heat (and generate a larger energy bill) than the LED fixtures that are available now. Plus, last year I took my thermostat-controlled heat mats to electronics recycling, as they’d gone haywire and fried my seeds.

But I’ve still managed to accidentally kill many of my seeds by placing my lights too close to the humidity domes on top. Nearly all 8 trays have a consistent pattern of damage; somewhat successful germination on the edges, which are further from the lights and closer to fresh air, and totally fried-to-death seeds in the center.

Seeds are really tough, especially when dormant. But once they’ve encountered moisture, as in with planting, they become susceptible to high temperatures. And I don’t know why I lowered my lights to just above each tray this time. I didn’t even plant any crops this spring that need heat to germinate!

This time I had used the plant tags that you can see above, which are much shorter in height than the ones I normally use. This allowed me to move the light fixture closer to the soil. So just because I could, I thought I’d give the plants a bit more light without even thinking about the extra heat from the lights. Of course I knew better from experience. But my mind was apparently elsewhere at the time.

Please don’t be careless like I was with my 11-year-old light setup! If you’re in the market for grow lights, it makes the most sense to buy some good LED ones. They may be a bit pricier up front, but if you’ll be using them every year, the energy savings and long lifespan of these bulbs should make it worth your while. And they’ll be less fiddly with heat considerations too.

However, because LED lights emit less heat, you may want to use thermostat-controlled heat mats under your flats if you’re growing crops like tomatoes, eggplants, peppers (especially spicy ones), melons, squash, and cucumbers that need heat to germinate. The old ones I had went haywire. It’s important to have high quality ones that’ll last you a long time.

If I end up buying a more up-to-date LED grow light setup, I’ll share the journey with you! For now, I’ve just replanted all of the fall seeds I’ve killed, of course swearing at myself all the while.

🌿Herbs in the garden this week

And now onto much more enjoyable stuff. I have so many photos that I think I’ll consolidate some of them into galleries to fit everything in.

🍃Purple basils

I’m growing 45 types of basil this year, and they’re totally separate varieties from the ones I grew and posted about last year: 38 Types of Basil You Need to Grow in Your Herb Garden. I’m really looking forward to documenting the photos, scents, and flavors of this year’s varieties too. And in having friends do tastings to help with the research!

The basils are all coming along nicely this summer. And the purple ones are doing especially well. I find that later in the season, they tend to sustain more insect damage than the green ones. Thankfully, this damage is generally mild. So I thought I’d share photos of these young purple beauties before the bugs might find them.

'Amethyst Improved,' 'Ararat,' 'Charamel chianti,' 'Crimson King,' 'Dark Opal,' 'New Guinea,' 'Purple Delight,' 'Red Freddy Genovese,' 'Red Genovese,'

And here’s one more that wouldn’t fit in the above gallery, ‘Red Rubin’ basil:

‘Red Rubin’ basil

Here are some more herbs that are looking good in the garden this week. There are volumes that I could write about all of these, but I’m not sure if you’d like more detailed ramblings about each variety.

If you’d like more individual herb commentary in future newsletters, please let me know in the comments below. You know I’m happy to oblige. I just don’t want to overload everyone if less detail is better. Please let me know!

There are almost 300 herb varieties in the herb garden, so there’ll be plenty more of them to discuss and include in blog posts. And/or I can give more detail about the ones here as well if helpful.

lime thyme, cilantro in bloom, green mitsuba, purple mitsuba, meadowsweet, munstead lavender, lemongrass, anise hyssop, caraway thyme

Among the photos below are 4 mint varieties. I have 54 of them this year, and I could definitely use some smelling and tasting help for anyone with superb mint endurance. There are so many great dishes we can make with them! Like the liqueur we made from the 17 varieties I grew last year: Homemade Crème de Menthe Guide: 6 Versions Reviewed. Please check it out to see which mints worked best for this!

roman chamomile, basil mint, lavender mint, balkan mint, grapefruit mint, pink panther catmint

🥕This week’s garden veggies

🧄Garlic scapes

These mild and delightful main stems of the garlic plant are perfect to enjoy in their own right, a few weeks before the new garlic heads are ripe underground. So growing garlic effectively gives you 2 crops in one!

I’m working on a recipe for using this really special veggie stems. I’ll keep you posted!

garlic scapes in the garden

🥔Potatoes

Potato flowers are adorable. And they’re a happy harbinger that ripe potatoes are just a few weeks away. Soon I’ll be posting about the harvests and tastes of the 28 varieties I’m growing this year. And you know I’ll need tasters!

potato flowers: huckleberry gold, purple majesty, purple peruvian, and red thumb

🌺Flowers

We have some great blossoms this week. Most of them are edible, apart from the morning glories and sweet peas that I can never resist growing. I’ve just created a spreadsheet to begin documenting their scents and flavors for upcoming blog posts.

And there will be many more as the growing season progresses. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to bring myself to actually taste (and thereby wreck) these gorgeous blooms! And the scents of many of them are just enchanting.

'Blue Monday Sage' salvia, 'Jackmanii Superba' clematis, various sweet peas, 'Tangerine Gem' marigold, clove pinks, 'Grand Marshall' monarda, 'Peaches and Cream' honeysuckle

'Prairie Splendor Deep Rose' echinacea, 'Pink Paradiso' echinacea, mauve cornflower, 'Frosty Mix' cornflower, cockscomb and celosia, 'Cosmic Red' cosmos, 'Indonesian Kennidura' cosmos, various cosmos, red phlox

'Split Second' morning glory, 'Happy Lights Figleaf' hollyhocks

Please let me know if you’d like more detail on my plant varieties in upcoming newsletters. There will be so many more exciting crops ripening in the garden this year! And there’s always so much to say about them.

If you haven’t already subscribed, please enter your email address below to get to more free newsletters and blog posts directly in your inbox. And please check out my blog Shovel and Crunch, and follow my social media pages. And I’d love it if you share the food and garden love with others. Thanks so much for being here on this exciting global cooking and heirloom gardening journey!

🌱Shell