
Our candy stripe zinnias thrived with little attention this summer in The Gimpy Garden. They are beautiful alongside almost any plant and so easy to grow that we’re planning to plant many more next year.
It’s been an exceptionally buggy summer, prompted by monsoon Spring rains which spurred waves of flying, crawling, digging and munching insects. Japanese beetles decimated our containers of kale and basil while the cucumbers and melons we planted in metal buckets and old livestock feeders spent much of the summer under floating row cloth to protect them from moth larvae that burrow into the young stems.
Then, despite a good crop, there was the widespread tomato blight and cucumber wilt that turned the foliage into ugly brown crinkled leaves.
We must garden differently next season. Well, more efficiently. We got behind the ball in late June and never recovered. So we spent the summer chasing garden problems rather than anticipating them.
When fall turns to winter and everything outside is put to bed, we’ll ease our garden grief by planning a low-cost easy-to-use drip or absorption system for containers and an elevated system for compost tea to replenish the nutrients lost to watering our container gardens.