Capturing Your Garden: Vegetable

A lot of us garden, but how many of us take pictures of our gardens to compare year after year? I do, and I’ll tell you why in three parts, starting with the Vegetable Garden.

Gardening is all about trial and error. What doesn’t work usually gets taken out, what works well may get a few more of the same added the following year. Yes, there are people who feel their gardens should be exactly the same year after year, but honestly, where is the fun in that? Then again, maybe that is the challenge.

Our vegetable gardens should be viewed the same way. You may really want Brussels sprouts to grow, but your chickens have other plans, as in eating the tender young stalks and never giving them a chance to produce. This can be frustrating or you can simply take that as a sign that you either need to block off the area to prevent destruction or try something else instead.

I like to take pictures of my gardens each year and throughout the season to collect an archive of what we grew when. This will help you plan your garden for next year rather well, as you can visually see what did well where, and what may need to be planted in another location to see if it fares any better.

Taking pictures of your vegetable garden will eliminate any guessing for crop rotation if you practice that. Tomatoes for instance shouldn’t be planted in the same location year after year but alternated with legumes (peas, beans, soy, etc.) to keep the soil rich and help prevent diseases. What the tomatoes take out of the soil to produce fruit, the legumes replace.

The other reason for taking pictures of your vegetable garden, whether it is a full-scale operation directly in the ground or a few pots on the patio, is to show people what you are growing or have grown in the past. Having those pictures will help to clarify growing tips if you stake or cage your tomatoes a certain way or use branches from a sapling maple that has been growing between your fence and the neighbor’s wood shed butted up to the fence for years that you finally decided to take a chainsaw to and tie the larger branches together and use as an arbor for pole beans to climb. Of course I didn’t take a picture of that this morning, but the beans are so tiny right now they’d get lost in the weeds that surround them. Soon… I promise.

And like I say to everyone with a camera, especially those who feel they have to be twenty feet away to take not only a picture of the subject but everything around them so that their subject gets lost and unrecognizable in the sea of busyness that surrounds, DON’T BE AFRAID TO GET UP CLOSE!!! When I take pictures of my gardens I take a couple full shots for perspective and then get as close as possible to take pictures of the plant’s features. If it has a flower I get as close as a centimeter, depending on the flower, to get a couple close-up shots for detail. Check your camera’s manual or play around to find out exactly how close you can get to a subject, but please get close. You will be rewarded with knowing what you are taking a picture of when you flip through your pictures later.