This fall I am greatly enjoying the single-row gardening plot:

Single-row garden plots are very easy to care for, need less water and are lovely to look at, especially on a misty morning.

This isn’t my normal method of gardening, though I have practiced it before, with black-eyed peas and a small plot of corn:

The single-row garden area of our fall plot is doing the best out of all the gardens, with the exception of a couple of the little test beds and one bed of onions I planted with Steve Solomon’s fertilizer mix.

I’m not sure why the single rows are so happy. They started poorly and were beat up by insect damage, then they started perking up. Now they look great.

Some of the turnips are almost ready:

Part of their happiness may be due to the couple of liquid fertilizer applications we gave them.

Though the area was limed, when I first planted these rows they had nothing else in the ground (other than turned-under sod) to eat. A couple weeks after they came up, I sprinkled 10-10-10 down the rows but didn’t notice much difference in the plants afterward. The next week I gave them all a liquid application of Dyna-Gro. Rainfall was poor and then they got beaten by Hurricane Zeta, which gave us a little rain, then rainfall almost ceased again. I watered the rows with a hose every time it didn’t rain for a whole week. Then a week and a half ago the kids and I gave them all a soak with a mixture of Dyna-Gro and Neptune’s Harvest Fish and Seaweed fertilizer. My thought was that the latter might help the biology of the soil a little, such as it is. It will also provide micro-micro-micro-nutrients that may not be in Dyna-Gro.

In the last couple of weeks, these rows have finally come together. Even the cabbages, which started very slow, are now looking good.

The cooler weather is probably partially responsible, as the bugs are almost gone, but I do think the single rows help too. Less competition for resources.

Two of my children are building a Planet Whizbang Wheel Hoe for me right now and when that’s done this area will be even easier to tend.

The turnips will be ready soon and I’m curious how much weight we’ll get out of our six rows.

You can see the patchy white damage on the older leaf caused by an as-of-yet unidentified insect pest. They look like itty-bitty grasshoppers. As the weather has cooled, they have mostly disappeared and the new leaves look much better.

Despite me not spraying, we are going to get plenty of turnips! Sometimes the best policy is just to wait.

Since this area is doing so well I will probably expand my single-row gardening in the spring. When we have this much land, why not? No need to pack things close anymore.