I was repeating “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” again and again as I tried to warm up my lips and tongue and mouth at my elocution class this week. Yes, I am a public speaker and I have radio and television experience but this fall I had to start all over again because I have begun to wear out my vocal chords.

“You are losing your voice because you have abused your voice,” said my  speaking coach Rosemary Barnes. So suddenly I have to relearn how to speak because I want to share what I’ve learned about gardening for years to come.

It has never been important to me to measure success in my garden. I’m not a farmer so I don’t make money based on pounds of peas grown. If I run out of something I can always buy it at the Farmer’s market or local store. But new gardeners want to know specifics. They want to know how much they can grow in a pot on their patio or in a straw-bale garden on their boulevard.

So this summer I started to weigh and measure my garden success by recording weights and counting yields. I know my family eats about one butternut squash a month and each plant yields about 6 large fruits so I only need two plants. Squash can be stored for a year or more, so this year I grew three plants, got twenty big squash and gave eight squash away to friends. I grew eight watermelons on one plant but they were all ready within three weeks and the two of us could not eat that much watermelon that fast.

 My Cantaloupes, on average, weighed four pounds each and they last about a week in the fridge so we managed to eat them all. We forgot to measure and lost count of zucchini but I know we had too many and all our neighbours know that too.  In general we have been picking and eating our carrots as we need them but just yesterday I finally harvested and remembered to weigh the carrots I pulled out of a plastic pot. My  primary goal in the 14″ x 14″ pot was to grow shelling peas with a few carrots in the centre of the pot. I am still picking peas and have now also pulled out 28 carrots, weighing 440 grams or about a pound in total. They were so numerous yet small because i seeded them in mid-July when I planted my late pea crop. I had already had an early crop of peas from that same pot.

All season I had been weighing the potatoes as I harvest them. When we needed potatoes in early July, we only had about 300 grams per pot. But the harvest yesterday, the last of the season, was the biggest because the plants had been left to grow longer and only started to die back recently.  The average Canadian eats about 71 kg. of potatoes a year so if you want to grow all you will need for a year, based on my harvest which gradually increased, you will need to plant 15-20 10-gallon pots of potatoes on your balcony. Yikes. (And if you prefer to buy potatoes buy organic because www.ewg.org reports they are one of the foods most likely to contain pesticides.)

Learning to direct and control my voice to get more power is a new experience for me and luckily Rosemarie is a great teacher; patient and talented. She promises, if I continue practicing my voice control and relaxing my lips I will make a bigger sound with less effort.

But in the garden, if you want to measure your success in vegetables grown in the ground, in a pot or on your patio in a fabric bag then start small and let it grow. You may not be able to do it all in your small space but what you do grow will taste fabulous. And if you do manage to pick a peck of peppers or all your own potatoes isn’t that a great measure of success?