I feel like practically an expert by now. Last year I planted a few plants in very bad clay soil. This year I had a real garden spot and it’s the first time in my life that I have planted a real garden. So here is what I’ve learned.

• There are such things as pole beans.
• If you plant pole beans, you should have a pole.
• You probably only need one kind of summer squash.
• Tomatoes would be good with a support too so they don’t all grow on the ground.
• Slugs love tomatoes.
• Beer kills slugs.
• Tomatoes can get several different kinds of fungi, esp. if you water them with a sprinkler and they are growing on the ground.
• You should water the ground with a hose, not a sprinkler.
• Corn can fall over really easily, consider support for that.
• Keep your seed packets so you’ll remember what you planted.
• If you find a random radish that you didn’t plant, enjoy!
• Sunflowers can surprisingly end up growing in your garden.
• 7 foot tall sunflower plants can fall down in a heavy rain (unless of course it really was a big animal).
• Corn can fall down in a heavy rain (see above).
• Beans are really hard to find when the pole bean plants without the poles are wrapped around themselves and every surrounding plant they can reach.
• Sunflowers make excellent poles for pole beans (until they fall down).
• Tomatoes are really hard to find when they are overgrown with pole beans.
• Don’t plant asparagus in your garden that you will be digging up every year.
• Plant things farther apart, even with poles.

I’m sure I have more education coming but that’s all I can think of for the moment. Look how much I learned in one year! My disappointments this year, the cauliflower, winter squash and catnip never grew at all. Nor the asparagus but that’s okay.