I finally found time to harvest the last of the carrots, so this year's garden season is officially over. I thought it would be nice to reflect on how it went and some of the successes and failures.
It was an interesting garden this year, because it was our first year in a new place and my first time with a real garden (since I moved out and stopped helping mom with her garden). I got to try out a lot of new things, and had to identify what was already growing in the garden—not always an easy task!
Probably the biggest disappointment this year was the potatoes. I tried growing potatoes in wire-cage towers lined with newspaper and gradually filled up with dirt as the potato plants grew. Unfortunately, we only ended up with a few tiny potatoes. My guess is that I didn't water the towers well enough and the plants dried up and died too early.
Quite a few of the things I planted didn't do very well, including the lettuce, cucumber, zucchini, and sunflowers. There are a couple reasons, I think. When we first moved in we only had a short hose that couldn't reach the whole garden, which made it a lot harder to water the garden properly, and in my enthusiasm to have a big garden I used an additional garden plot that had clearly not been used for much by the past tenant since it didn't have very good soil and was full of rocks. I tried getting the worst of the rocks out, but it still wasn't that great for growing things.
Successes:
Although many of the things I tried didn't work out, there were still some that did! The peas did very well, and so did the carrots and the kale (which is still growing and being harvested). My strawberries were very happy to be in the ground rather than a pot and they did quite well. One of the plants that came with the garden, the sorrel, also deserves to be mentioned since it did very well too!
Honourable mentions:
I was pleasantly surprised with how well my tomatoes did this year, considering I grew them from seed—something I had never tried before. Although they did very well, unfortunately we didn't get much of a harvest, for two reasons: the kids. Steven absolutely loved the cherry tomatoes and regularly ate all the ripe ones right out of the garden. And as soon as Kenneth became mobile he discovered the joys of picking unripe tomatoes and throwing them around the yard.
My goji seedlings are continuing to do well. Next year I may get a couple berries, but apparently it is the third year when they really start producing. I'm looking forward to that!
So ends my 2017 garden! Now I'm just praying that our landlords will let us renew our lease so I can enjoy gardening here next year too!
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