If you’ve been following us for awhile, you know that my favorite part of our garden is the vegetable garden. I love everything about my vegetable garden: planning what I’m going to plant each year, buying spring starts & physically planting them, watching my veggies grow, cultivating fresh produce for farm-to-table meals, sharing my bounty, and amending the soil at the end of the season to prepare for the next season. My vegetable garden is what most connects me to the earth and nature.
And then 2018 happened and I’m not enjoying my usual vegetable garden bliss. It all began when I decided to plant fava beans at Thanksgiving last year in each of my 15 available raised beds. By the time I returned to my Napa garden to check on things, I had huge plants and a CRAZY amount of fava beans. (Literally hundreds or more). This was a good thing because I knew it was doing great things for the soil and for next year’s crop potential.
Beautiful fava bean flowers
However, I couldn’t bring myself to remove the plants in the springtime because the flowers were so beautiful and we were enjoying the fava beans so much. So I ended up pulling them out rather late in the growing season – mid to late May. And as a result, I was late planting my starts (which usually happens the first weekend of April) and barely got the starts I wanted from Forni-Brown, our local source for organic starts. So, now I’m behind.
On the positive side of things, the fava bean plants did wonders for my soil because my plants look fabulously abundant and healthy – more abundant than prior years. So my real gripe is that everything is late this year. So, perhaps I’ll just try planting my favas a full month earlier next year so I can get back on schedule. I just feel “off” this year.
