Help! My garden has run amok!!!

[Lady_Irish]

So I planted some veggies and herbs and a couple flowers in my teeny tiny garden bed out back (we live IN town. ergh). It was going well. We even managed to have a couple salads from the greens I had grown! Yum! Then the unthinkable happened... I forgot to prune and weed for about a week. Oops. Apparently my lettuce decided to lead a mutiny and when I did managed to get back out there, almost EVERYthing had grown nearly another foot taller!! So my question is, is it too late to salvage anything from my garden for use this year? Or should I just let it continue on its merry way?? This was my first attempt in, shall we say, MANY years to have a garden. Ergh... Thanks in advance!

 

[OaklandCityFarmer]

Welcome to the forum and good job on the garden in the city!

So, let me ask you, if the garden is growing too fast and too much that you can keep up with eating, weeding, etc maybe you just planted too much?

Either way, pick what you need when you need it. I don't necessarily adhere to the whole notion that you have to weed all the time, prune and pick, fix and move. I kind of let things grow and take their course. I usually get a lot more than anticipated and things turn out fine. Of course there are times that a disease will spread because things are planted too closely but that's a different story.

I'm thinking it's not all that bad. I think if you head out there do a bit of weeding, lay down some thick mulch and pick what you can use or process now you should be okay. Then just let things go their merry way and you'll pick and process again.

Good luck!

 

[patandchickens]

The lettuce is probably bolting, which if it makes you feel any better it was going to do it ANYway whether you picked and weeded it or not You can plant a second crop for the fall if you have somewhere to keep the seedlings part-shaded and sort of cool (you might want to start them in small containers for now).

I don't know what other plants you have, but chances are you will get SOME sort of crop from them. Like Carlos says, go do a major mega-weeding *now*, and mulch where the weeds were, and you'll be able to see better what you've got.

Last year I ended up with an almost impenetrable tomato jungle (b/c the garden, in a new site, turned out to be FAR more fertile than I expected when I was deciding how far apart to plant, and then I got behind on staking). A whole lot of tomatoes rotted b/c I couldn't get to (or sometimes even *see*) them. But you know what, oh well, it made the voles happy and I still got LOTS of tomatoes.

This year I still put the darn things too close together but I've been doing a better job w/staking so at least I can get in there and see what I'm doing <g>

If some of your plants that you don't care too much about are overrunning plants that you *do*, you could also think about cutting back or even removing the former for the sake of the latter.

Good luck and have fun,

Pat