It’s time for to chat about the Garden Corner Harvest. That would be the Garden Corner seeds that I bought at Dollarama in Cloverdale.
The Garden Corner seeds are distributed by McKenzie Seeds, a well known Canadian brand. I wasn’t sure if the dollar store label was the runt of the litter when it comes to flower and vegetable seeds. But for .34¢ a package, it seemed like a small price to pay to find out. Even though the seed packet label says 99¢, they rang through the check out in the lower amount.
I bought zucchini, watermelon and pepper seeds.
And just how did my garden grow?
THE WEATHER
In late June, 2021, the Greater Vancouver Area had a heatwave.
Local farmers were on the news because their crops were dying of heat exhaustion. With temperatures in 100F plus, berries were baking on the vines. Same with other fruits. My rhubarb did nothing this year except shrivel up.
It was almost two months before we saw any rain. That meant I was bringing water every morning to my garden, seeing as how the hose doesn’t reach to my little planter garden.
I have two pitchers I fill at the kitchen sink and it takes about six trips to water my garden.
Which I dutifully did every morning before going to work.
THE GARDEN CORNER HARVEST
How did my garden grow?
Let’s start with the easy one – peppers.
Nothing.
That’s right.
Zippo.
The only thing growing in the pepper pot was weeds.
I had about three zucchini plants make it from nine seeds – the entire contents of the Garden Corner package. Although several zucchinis flowered, only three zucchinis grew. Two zucchinis were edible. The third was rotten.
I also had about three watermelon plants survive and quite a few little watermelons were on the vines. I don’t know what happened to them. Maybe something was eating them at night. By the time the plants started dying off, I harvested the crop. That was about six watermelons ranging in size from a baseball to a large cantaloupe.
I suspected they might be ripe because something chewed through one of the smaller watermelons and I could see the red fruit inside.
So I decided to hustle all the other watermelons into my fridge before they became a midnight snack for another uninvited guest.
I brought one out to the deck and cut it open.
This one hadn’t fully turned red inside. Had I harvested too soon? Well, I didn’t have much choice. The watermelon plants themselves were dying. But I’m cowgirl brave. Time for a taste test. I grabbed a spoon and took a small portion of the red. It was OK, but I abandoned it. I decided I’d be happier trying another watermelon where the fruit had fully turned red.
The next watermelon I cut was bigger than a baseball and had good color. I dug the spoon in and it was pretty good. In fact, I polished the whole watermelon off. The biggest problem as you can see from the photo is there are a ton of seeds.
If you look at the packet, the big slice of watermelon has no seeds in sight!
Although I prefer the seedless variety, watermelon seeds don’t bother me that much. I just crunch through them like they’re sunflower seeds. When I was younger I used to have pretty good aim at spitting watermelon seeds.
THE GARDEN CORNER SEEDS – FINAL VERDICT
I’m not sure how much of the sad harvest from the Garden Corner seeds I can blame on the heat wave in late June or the sunny summer.
The pepper seeds were planted at least a month before the heat wave and they never poked their heads up.
Last year I used a different seed brand and got a lot of zucchini. One of my coworkers brought in a box of zucchini a couple of months ago for the staff to grab, so I’m thinking overall the hot weather didn’t affect someone else’s crop.
I even made my slightly healthier chocolate chip zucchini muffins from that lunchroom zucchini.
The watermelon were puny. Even the mini watermelons at the grocery store are bigger than my crop.
When I bought these seeds, I wondered if they might be inferior, undesirables, culled from the regular seeds due to being imperfect.
That is now my verdict. The Garden Corner Seeds are seeds that aren’t good enough to be sold as McKenzie Seeds, but it’s possible they’ll grow and produce a meager crop. For a buck or less – in my case 34¢ each – customers probably aren’t going to complain about a harvest that sucks.
Would I buy the Garden Corner Seeds again?
No thanks. I’ll pass.
Did you buy Garden Corner seeds? How did your crop grow?
Published by Cheryl @ The Lifestyle Digs on September 29, 2021.
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