Autumn Harvest

Bought Burpee seeds in May.

Planted in containers on patio in Miracle Grow soil.

Today – harvest time!

Interesting things I learned:

1. Pickles have thorns.
2. Lettuce has thorns.
3. Heirloom seeds aren’t always a good idea.
4. The packaging is WRONG and plants take much much longer to grow than Burpee said it would.
5. One person’s “mild” radish is another person’s horseradish.
6. Vegetables don’t just pop out of the soil easily with a little tug. It takes WORK to get them out.
7. It matters when you plant stuff (according to Burpee). My “mild and delicate tasting” radishes were strong and very difficult to eat – Burpee said if I had planted in March instead of May, they would have been milder.
8. Miracle Grow soil is the gold standard.
9. Most of the Burpee lettuce seeds didn’t come up.
10. I don’t understand how the plant decided to go to seed when it is supposed to be producing vegetables. I only got three cukes from my picklebush!
11. One of the Burpee lettuce plants looks like a weed and tastes like a weed. It is not lettuce and should not be sold as lettuce.
12. You will have thousands of leftover seeds. Label them and use them again next year. I’m going to try to grow a few plants in the house in containers over winter and see how it goes.
13. None of my veggies were the size that Burpee said they would be. Everything was half to a quarter of the size on the package.
14. Do you think the problem was the Burpee seeds? Maybe I should have gotten seeds from a local nursery so they would be familiar with the Chicago climate and grow properly.
15. Veggies (mine at least) grow in a very crooked and sometimes unattractive manner. I don’t know why.