August 20, 2008 04:01 am The other day I went to cut some thyme from my garden for a recipe, and I couldn't find the plant. It had disappeared under the green beans. I am guilty, yet again, of planting my vegetables too close together. My cherry peppers are engaged in a border skirmish with the yellow squash; there have been casualties. If my tomato plants were healthier, I'm sure they would be crowded, too. As I slashed my way through overgrown and overcrowded lettuce plants to find my former herb garden, I considered what went wrong. My garden is twice as big as it was last year, yet I planted pretty much the same things. I added yellow squash, but I left out cucumbers. I doubled the parsley, but I didn't plant basil. Where did all the space go? Well, maybe I should start with the roughly two dozen hot pepper plants I put in the ground in the spring. I planted enough hot peppers to burn the taste buds off my entire neighborhood, not because I eat a lot of hot peppers, but because I was afraid the plants wouldn't grow. Likewise, I planted every single tomato seedling I had — about 18 — because I figured the majority of them would succumb to disease or malnourishment or bad luck and the more I started with, the more I would have in the end. Now that most of the plants are fully grown, I can see that's just not how it works. Plants need space. By crowding my garden, I caused the problems I was trying to prevent: disease, malnourishment and squash leaves blocking the sun from the frontline soldiers in the hot-pepper army. My herb garden, the only part of the garden that originally had plenty of space, might have turned out beautifully if I hadn't filled in all the gaps with green-bean seeds. I never intended to obliterate the herb garden. I was just trying to compensate for the damage chipmunks did to my first round of green beans in the spring. I emptied an entire seed packet into all the little spaces in the garden to compensate. They were year-old seeds, I reasoned, and probably wouldn't germinate anyway. Not so. Not only did they germinate, they flourished. The original green beans recovered, too. Now green bean plants are crammed in every corner of the garden and pushing the boundaries. After some hunting through the leaves, I finally located my thyme plant — a compact little shrub that could fit in my cupped palms — cowering under the green bean canopy. I also located the tarragon fighting its way up through the foliage for a taste of sun. I pushed aside the green bean plants to make a little space. Next year, I vowed, I would try really, really hard to leave some space between the plants. Or maybe I could just add a few more garden beds. That would solve the problem, right? Julie Kirkwood is a freelance writer for The Eagle-Tribune. Her column, Yard Dirt, appears most Wednesdays. She also keeps a gardening blog, Yard Dirt: Sharing Seeds, at www.eagletribune.com.
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