I’m finally getting back to my blog! Our 2026 garden season has certainly been one to remember, although not necessarily for the reasons I expected. It ended up giving us a real-world look at how our wicking beds in a drought performed when life kept me away from the garden.
It has been a long time since I’ve written here, and there’s a pretty good reason for that. From January through June, work completely took over my life. It required weekend work and overtime for months! By the time I finally surfaced, I had very little energy left for much of anything else.
I did get to help plant our summer garden, but I missed out on the spring planting. My husband kept things moving while work consumed most of my time, and I was grateful that we managed to plant a garden at all.
By the time July rolled around, I was finally able to start spending more time outside again. Unfortunately, I came back to a completely out-of-control garden.
And the timing wasn’t exactly ideal.
Heat, Drought, and Garden Neglect
We had already been dealing with severe heat waves that started in June, and the heat continued for weeks into and through July. At the same time, we were in a serious drought.
Because we rely on well water, drought affects more than just the garden. As the water table drops, wells can begin to dry up, and several homes on our street were experiencing that. Naturally, we had to cut back on our own water use during drought, which made keeping the garden watered even more difficult.
We never got our automatic watering system hooked up, so watering was already inconsistent despite drought. Then our well pump died. Of course, the replacement part was the wrong one, leaving us without water for more than a week.
Because apparently, the garden needed a little extra adversity this year. 😅
As if that wasn’t enough, our car broke down and needed new tires, our thermostats stopped working, and we were also dealing with the usual transition from the last days of school into summer break with the kids. One thing seemed to follow another, and the garden continued to receive whatever attention I could manage to give it.
By August, we finally had a chance to really look at what was happening out there. Some things had managed to hang on surprisingly well. Others had not been nearly so fortunate.
The Squash Was a Complete Bust
The squash was probably the biggest disappointment of the season.
We had four garden rings with three squash plants in each. We always overplant because we know we’re going to lose some plants along the way. Between squash vine borers, disease, weather, and all the other things that can go wrong, we’ve learned not to put all our hopes into a handful of plants.
This year, though, we lost almost all of them.
We still have about six plants hanging on, but squash vine borers targeted those too, and they haven’t produced anything. The inconsistent watering, severe heat, and relentless vine borers completely wiped out this year’s squash crop.
We didn’t get a single squash.
Not one. Zero. Nada.
For a crop that we planted twelve plants for, that’s a pretty spectacular level of disappointment.
At this point, the remaining plants are mostly taking up garden space and reminding us that the squash vine borers won this round. We’ll be pulling them out soon and will probably try to get some sort of fall crop into that space instead.
I’m trying not to take it personally. It’s gardening, after all. Sometimes you plant twelve squash plants and get exactly what the garden decides you deserve: nothing.
Unfortunately, the squash wasn’t the only crop that struggled.
Our In-Ground Crops
We planted beans in two different locations in the ground. The beans in our main garden plot received some shade throughout the day, which has always been one of the challenges with that particular area of the garden. This year, though, I think that shade may actually have helped. Those beans survived and have done fairly well.
The beans planted in our two remaining garden rings didn’t do nearly as well. They receive a lot more direct sun, and because we weren’t able to water consistently, they struggled.
We also noticed a big difference between the beans we staked and the ones we didn’t. Again, I wasn’t intending to run an experiment—we simply ran out of stakes! The ones we usually buy were out of stock, so we put it off and eventually stopped caring. But look at the difference between the staked and unstaked beans, even though both received exactly the same amount of neglect.
We planted cucumbers in the main garden plot alongside the beans, and unfortunately, they didn’t make it either. We got no cucumbers this year. Between the heat and the inconsistent watering, they simply couldn’t keep up.
Our in-ground tomatoes, on the other hand, have been a very pleasant surprise.
Despite my neglect, they just kept growing. In fact, they grew so vigorously that I had to go back and string up at least half of the plants after they had already become quite leggy and unruly. I didn’t train them the way they should have been as they grew.
But they are incredibly productive!
I had pine mulch around the tomatoes, and I planted them in a somewhat shadier area of the garden. I’m certain both helped. Even though I wasn’t watering consistently, the mulch helped retain moisture, and the plants also avoided the most intense afternoon sun. My only observation is that the tangled tomato vines did develop some minor fungal issues from resting on each other and close to the ground.
Still, there was one part of our garden that really stood out when we finally had a chance to take stock.
Our wicking beds were absolutely thriving.
Our Wicking Beds Thrived
If there was ever a summer that could put our wicking beds to the test, this was it.
When we built our wicking beds, our goal was to make gardening less dependent on constant watering. We didn’t want our plants to drown when we had too much rain, but we also didn’t want them to die every time we went through a drought.
And, perhaps most importantly, we didn’t want to become slaves to our garden.
We wanted to be able to step away when life demanded our attention without knowing that our plants would immediately suffer because we weren’t standing there with a hose.
That’s one of the reasons we built our six 150-gallon stock-tank wicking beds. The water reservoir at the bottom gives the plants access to moisture even when we’re not actively watering them. If you’re curious about the thinking behind our setup, you can read more about Why We Use Wicking Beds here.
This summer, that feature turned out to be incredibly valuable.
While the in-ground garden was struggling with heat, drought, and inconsistent watering, the wicking beds just kept growing.
What Grew in Our Wicking Beds
Our Husky Red tomatoes are probably the best example. We planted six plants in one of our 150-gallon stock-tank wicking beds, and they are absolutely enormous. The plants are green, healthy, and producing huge, beautiful red tomatoes.
We also have peppers growing in another wicking bed, with approximately six plants producing some of the biggest and healthiest peppers we’ve grown.
Then there are the pole beans.
They are completely out of control!
The plants have grown into a huge mass of vines, but they’re green, healthy, and producing plenty of green beans. At this point, I’m mostly trying to figure out how to get into the middle of them to pick everything!
Even our lettuce surprised me.
We had lettuce growing in one of the wicking beds that just kept going and going. Eventually, it completely overgrew the container and we had to pull it out. What surprised me most was that it continued to thrive through the intense summer heat, even though lettuce is normally a cool-weather crop and this particular bed gets full sun.
That was one of those garden moments that makes you stop and think.
Lettuce would normally struggle in summer heat, yet ours was thriving while other crops were struggling.
Why Wicking Beds Worked
We didn’t plan any of this as an experiment. Life simply created the conditions for one.
There are probably several reasons the wicking beds performed so well.
The first is the growing medium. We refresh our wicking bed soil every year and fertilize them with worm castings but don’t amend our in-ground garden soil to quite the same degree. We do improve it, but the wicking beds get a more concentrated effort when it comes to refreshing and replenishing their growing medium.
The water reservoir is another important difference. In fact, the water reservoir is the main reason we built the beds in the first place. Too much rain drains away, while the reservoir stores water during dry periods.
That doesn’t mean the plants never need attention or that a wicking bed can magically overcome every gardening problem. But in a summer when we simply couldn’t give the garden the attention it normally receives, having that reserve of water available made a tremendous difference.
And I think that’s the part I appreciate most now.
What This Season Taught Us
We never planned for our wicking beds and in-ground garden to become an accidental experiment, but this summer gave us an unexpected chance to see how they handled the same difficult conditions. I wasn’t trying to conduct an experiment, and I certainly wasn’t planning to spend the summer seeing how little attention I could give the garden. I was working, we had family responsibilities, and we were dealing with equipment failures, extreme heat, drought, and all the ordinary complications that come with real life. The garden simply had to cope.
That’s what makes this season so interesting to me. Before this summer, I knew our wicking beds were useful. We built them specifically to conserve water and make gardening easier, and I knew the reservoirs could help during dry periods and give us some freedom from constant watering. But knowing something in theory and seeing it happen in your own garden are two very different things.
The in-ground garden showed us just how difficult heat, drought, and inconsistent watering can be. Some crops managed to hang on, while others simply couldn’t. The wicking beds, meanwhile, kept producing. The tomatoes grew enormous, the peppers flourished, the pole beans became almost ridiculous, and even the lettuce carried on far longer than I ever expected.
After months away from the garden, I came back expecting to see everything that had gone wrong. Instead, I found one of the most encouraging gardening lessons I’ve had in a long time.
Our garden doesn’t have to be perfect to be successful.
Building a Garden That Can Cope
Sometimes the best thing we can do is build systems that give our plants a fighting chance when we can’t be there to take care of them. That’s exactly what we hoped our wicking beds would do when we built them, and this summer, they proved it.
Now I’m looking around our property wondering if maybe we should have built even more of them. Maybe someday we’ll fill the whole place with wicking beds! 😂 I’m not quite ready to make that commitment yet, but after this summer, I certainly understand their value more than I did before.
The squash may have won this particular battle, but I’m calling the wicking beds the real winners of our 2026 garden season. ❤️ you go, we’d love to have you along as we keep figuring this out. 🌱
All photography by @heldthrulightbyjw
