The joys and frustrations of a food garden

Installment #31 of Nine Years at Panther's Hollow

My first growing season at Panther’s Hollow was more experimentation than anything. I was starting out with only a few beds, so my plantings weren’t very ambitious. My square-foot beds yielded a little bit of spinach, along with some onions, parsley, beets, and bush beans. I harvested a few ounces of strawberries now and then from the everbearing plants I had purchased at the garden center, but not enough to be worth the cost of the plants. Of course I found a place for zucchini, the one easy-to-grow vegetable that practically never fails.

I’m sure I tried carrots, but those were a flop. In fact, I was never able to grow decent carrots at Panther’s Hollow—or back in Pennsylvania either, for that matter. Gradually I realized they need nice loamy soil, free of stones, and they hate clay; so after several years I gave up trying to grow them. I felt better when I learned that my homesteader friend Lynn in nearby Shady Valley had little success with them either. She said her carrots tasted like the earth, which is how mine tasted—the few of them that were actually edible, that is. Mostly they were tough and gnarly, often with forked roots.