Failure Is An Orphan

Not everything planted ends up being a success.  In this posting, I share the sad story of my first attempt to grow sweet potatoes and a my strategy for ensuring overall success of my garden.

There's an old saying, "Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan."  The same is true with vegetable gardening; look at catalogs, books and blogs and you see gardens abundant with perfect lettuces, mouthwatering tomatoes and tall and tempting sweet corn.  But the these are the gardening success; what isn't shown or talked about are the orphans -- the lettuces that were devoured by slugs or the spinach that bolted due to a hot spell. 

I think the downside to orphaning of failures is that it sets false expectations for new gardeners who think that they should get perfect results like the ones the see in these catalogs, books and blogs.

So without further ado, here is a candid admission of my first gardening failure of the year.  This year I planted sweet potatoes for the first time.  Unlike Irish Potatoes, which are planted with seed potatoes, sweet potatoes are started from "slips" which are the sprouts that grow out of older potatoes. The slips are cut off the potatoes and planted directly in the ground. 

I ordered my sweet potato slips from Steele Plant Company in Tennessee.  They are shipped via Priority Mail because It's important to get the slips in the ground as quickly as possible.  Mine arrived in early May and I planted them the day after they arrived.

Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate.  Rain, heavy winds and cold temperatures pounded these poor sweet potato slips for two days.  This is exactly the worst thing that can happen to sweet potatoes which are originally from South America and are a tropical plant.  They like warm weather, and they didn't get it.

The net result is that half of the plants died and I was forced to reorder new ones.  The ones that lived are recovering, but we continue to have a very cool, wet spring which is really impeding their growth.  If I harvest sweet potatoes this year, it will probably be a very modest crop.  Maybe none at all.  And the cold weather bodes ill for watermelons and squashes which I also planted this year.

The morale of the story is that in gardening like in other endeavors, things don't always go as planned and you should expect some failures each year.  Weather, aphids, slugs, whatever, something in your garden is going to take a hit.

My strategy is to grow a variety of vegetables to hedge my bets.  The key for every gardener is to get the proper balance -- more vegetable varieties provides a hedge against failure, but they also mean more work for the gardener.  Everyone will be different in this regard, but as a starting point, I would recommend you consider growing about 6-8 types of veggies for any particular season.

Although my sweet potatoes are likely to be a flop, I've already harvested sugar snap peas, four varieties of lettuce, pak choi (bok choi), broccoli raab, strawberries, kale and chard.  My Irish potatoes are doing well, beans and peppers in the works, and I have tomato plants that have already begun to set fruit in the greenhouse. 

All in all, it's shaping up to be a pretty good year -- a bunch of success and a few orphans too.