Gardening Peer Pressure

It starts with "you must try this!" So you do. Then it becomes "you must do it this way." Then all of a sudden, you don't know your head from your tail and your garden has become a mish-mash of things that you don't really like or don't really eat. It is incredibly insidious. For instance, a friend of my husband's gardens in upstate New York. Totally different climate, soil, and varieties which work up there. He generously sent me a bunch of different seeds that he had saved. I sent him back seeds that I had saved. There weren't many at the time since I had not gone in feet first yet. I was still in the toe in the water phase. As I was talking to him last night, he said "Have you grown the yellow jelly tomato yet? It is fabulous." And then went on and on about how I should do it and "oh, you don't have space? Just put it in a bucket." Now, I have something to confess here. Wait for it, its a shocker.

I don't like cherry or grape type tomatoes.

There, I said it. You can all take time now and recover from the shock I just gave you.

Better now? Good. It's not that I haven't tried to like the darn things. I just don't. I like slicing tomatoes, especially on a turkey sandwich or a burger. Just not the darn little ones. I even grew them one year. So I know that I don't like them. I certianly don't want to grow things that I don't like. So after that, I got off the phone quick-like.

There was also the same debacle over what type of squash to put in the Three Sisters bed. NY friend said "use winter squash, that's what worked for me" to my husband. Husband said "Use winter squash, it'll make the corn work better. NY friend used summer and the corn was awful. He used winter squash and it worked better." See? Insidious.

I went and did a ton of research, concluded that the main function of the squash in the Three Sisters planting was to shade roots and proposed an experiment. Again, I am not a huge fan of winter squashes only having been introduced to them on very infrequent occasions. There are two butternut squashes in my fridge, waiting for me to figure out what the heck to do with them. But back on topic... I proposed an experiment to my husband. I would plant half of it with winter squash, and half of it with summer squash and see where the corn did better.

I strongly suspect that it will all do just fine.