I didn’t post much about my garden this year, mostly because I wasn’t blogging much during the period when I was gardening a lot and getting lots of stuff out of it. I wanted to post about the progress this year though and some thoughts for myself to think about for next year.
First off, here are a couple of posts from last year to show what I was working with this year: Garden 2009 and More Gardening. The big change this year was terracing the two side gardens, which were very sloped last year and had erosion and water-pooling problems. I did this while in the third trimester with Fiona, but it actually felt really good to get outside and get things done in the garden while pregnant. (Most of these pictures were taken earlier in the year.)
The plan (if we’re still living here of course!) is to use the big one above as part of our rotation of veggies, and the smaller side one is just full of strawberries which are still producing strawberries daily for us even now.
As far as my thoughts, here are things that worked well this year, and what I will likely change (regardless of where we end up next summer!).
Our bee garden was a great idea. We got lots of bees and butterflies, and even saw a hummingbird or two.
Once again, our peas grew really well. Unfortunately, this year I chose two varieties (one snap pea and one shelling pea) that claimed they didn’t need trellising, and then planted them in four rows together. I had read that it was best to trellis even varieties that don’t need it, but because of limited space thought I’d try it my way. Lesson learned: The peas grew into a huge tangled mess, it was hard to differentiate between the two varieties, and a lot of peas ended up wasted because they got lost in the middle of the tangled mess. Next year, I will trellis the peas and separate different varieties.
I learned several things about tomatoes this year. First of all, they don’t do well in pots. I had only grown tomatoes in pots last year, and thought they did okay though not stellar. This year, I grew two varieties (including a dwarf variety) in big pots, and three heirloom varieties directly in the garden. I am amazed at the difference. The ones in the garden were bigger, bushier, and way more productive. They make the potted ones look spindly. In fact, I didn’t buy tomato cages that are nearly big enough and all three of the garden ones ended up falling over. Slugs were bad, and when the tomatoes started to even think about turning colours the slugs started in on them. I picked a lot of them green and left them to ripen in paper bags, but lost a bunch to slugs or that just rotted instead of ripening. I do have three huge bags of the heirloom golden ones that I am going to make into sauce or salsa though.
Our carrots are doing great now, after doing pretty dismally earlier in the year. The lettuces I planted didn’t do awesome but the ones that are growing are growing enough to give us lettuce for sandwiches, burgers, and salads whenever we want some. We had a weird spring/summer here and most of our cauliflower and broccoli bolted this year.
I planted the squashes all too close together and they’re hard to get to to harvest. Next year I want to look into trellising them. The cucumber plants did great this year, as did our zucchini. We have about 20 cups of grated zucchini in the freezer to use this winter. There are two pumpkins out there ready to harvest any day (maybe today!), which is neat. It was my first time trying those.
Our potatoes did well, but next year I will plant less plants and space them further apart. None of the plants grew many potatoes and the ones that did grow were fairly small. Still, we got enough that I harvested the last ones in early August and we probably have enough left to last through this month at least. Not quite the whole winter supply I was hoping for but not bad either. Next year I want to try a variety called Green Mountain.
I’ve been reading a lot about permaculture lately. It keeps coming up in different (seemingly unrelated) places from different people. My sister-in-law linked this article about Homeschooling and Permaculture this morning which I thought was really interesting. I don’t want to use too much more of the yard than what I’ve already used, as it’s nice for Meredith to have a place she can go out and play without me, but once we have our own place I plan to over time make a lot of our space into edible plants, medicinal herbs and flowers, and natural pasture.
I’d also like to learn more about saving seeds, and start taking part in the seed-trading events that happen in late winter here.
Related posts:
How o you store potatoes so they don’t go bad?
Ours are just sitting in a bowl in our pantry.
If we had got as many as I’d hoped, our plan was to just store them in our cooler somewhere they wouldn’t be disturbed too much. It’s best to put them somewhere cool and dark, and they can do fine for a long time. The reason store-bought potatoes often go bad so fast is because they’ve often been picked months ago. If you buy potatoes from the store in March, likely they were grown the previous summer.
Ahh that is good to know. I want to grow pototoes, but I didn’t know how I would store them.