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Comment by rini17 | Hacker News Reader

I lost some crops myself but tomatoes still fared better than other vegetables. It's not like some enormous investment? Having homegrown tomatoes every other year is better than nothing. If you have kids, it's a good lesson about difficulty of obtaining food from nature.

I had success with mycorrhizal "good" fungi (brand Symbivit), they were keeping bad fungi away with visible difference between treated and untreated plants.

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Well it's depressing. My mother has a fairly large garden (some 1500 sqare meters) and takes quite some amount of labor to tend to it. So you work all spring and early summer only to see the crops wither away... makes you go on depression pills or just abandon the whole darn thing and buy Duch imported plastic vegetables.

A bit unrelated, nowadays my mother was telling me a memory from her teenage years in the 60s. In early summer she'd come home for the weekend from boarding school in the city and her mother (my grandma) would greet her with lunch and a salad made from fresh cucumber and onion (add salt, oil and vinegar). It would be too early for tomatoes but she still remembers the taste of that early salad.

This year I grew cucumbers on my balcony for the first time, and they were surprisingly low-effort. You do need to pollinate them, if you're too high for bees, or other insects. That aside I just watered them twice a day, except on days I forgot, and hoped for the best.

Tomatoes are a bit hit and miss for me, hence trying something new this year. Usually I just grow strawberries and tomatoes at home. Other stuff gets grown on a 10m x 10mx patch of land nearby.

I recall cucumbers are also prone to diseases but perhaps not as sensitive as tomatoes. One thing, if you don't water them diligently, they will grow bitter. Like quinine-level bitterness, enjoy eating them like that! :)

1500sqm is absolutely not needed for occasional nutritional enrichment. That's why I mentioned pot on balcony. But yes, being forced as kid to help tending big garden does leave some scars.

>> being forced as kid to help tending big garden does leave some scars

Heh, brings back trauma memories :) But I guess it's countryside vs city life. I see my city-boy kid and his friends, bored, staring at screens whenever they can and generally having a hard time figuring out what to do with their free time. Having grown in the countryside, the answer to that was easy "tend to the crops". It's not backbreaking work but can take huge chunks of your time and it's not exactly enjoyable, I mean I'd definitely have done something else, even staring at a wall but that wasn't an option. And it wasn't just me of course, everyone I knew was doing that. I recall with some amusement a friend of mine, in the context of summer vacation (hence lots of crop tending to do), exclaiming at some point "man, I can't wait for the school to start so I can get some relaxation".

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