We’ve started to have some frost here at night, and the days are definitely getting cooler.
A good cheapskate would dutifully cover my two little garden plots each night and squeeze a little bit more growth out of them, but I’m not bothering.
It was a weird summer. First cold and really wet, then hot and dry. Toward the end of the summer, life got in the way of my garden. I often forgot to water it as often as I should. We still managed to have an ample supply of fresh tomatoes, green beans, raspberries and an abundance of zucchini.
And after all that, I really feel like I got what I needed from the garden this year. I’m okay with letting it go.
This is my third year of growing produce – the second year of having two 4×4 garden plots, and each year I learn new things.
This year, I learned that I am lousy on figuring out what veggies to plant next to each other. I probably would’ve had carrots this year, if I had not put them in the shadows of the zucchini. My little cherry tomato plant did well, but could have done so much better in a different spot.
I also learned that if something doesn’t work one year, try again another year. Last year I planted beans, the slugs arrived, and my dog ripped out my bean plants. I wasn’t going to even bother with them this year, until my boys planted beans from seeds at preschool. The plants stayed healthy and produced numerous delicious side dishes for us.
I also learned to take the time to observe more. I thought it was a bad year for the wild raspberries in my neighborhood, until I realized that there was a whole other area I had yet to search.
I’ve finally begun a compost pile, and next year, I hope to try my hand at canning.
Since I certainly didn’t put a lot of time into this garden, I’m happy I didn’t put much money in either. I spent less than $15 on plants and supplies this year and got at least 3 times that amount back in produce.
I’m already looking forward to starting fresh next spring.
What above you – how did your garden grow?
This year we grew tomatoes, both cherry and regular, snap peas, broccoli, green beans and carrots. We had to make our garden smaller this year after putting up a new fence that deer trampled last year (and pulled up every carrot but one!), so things were more crowded. I have to look at the carrots today, but I don’t think they did well because they were in the shade of the tomato plants, which were huge this year. The snap peas were new to us, and although the were yummy, our 3 1/2 fence just wasn’t tall enough for them, so many plants ended up falling over and breaking. Even though it was a hot and dry summer, we ended up with lots of produce!
Sounds like you had a lot of opportunities to learn what works and what doesn’t! Happy to hear you were able to grow a lot of produce – that will definitely help with groceries this winter!