I received my first seed catalog for 2016 yesterday. It couldn’t have come at a better time as the days have been dreary and the temperatures have dipped around here lately. About the time I receive the first catalog, I like to take a moment to reflect on the past growing season just so I can prepare myself for the new growing season. This past year was a difficult year for me, garden wise. Not because my crops failed, but because I split my time between two houses – my mom’s house and my boyfriend’s house – both with gardens. It was hard for me to keep track of the progress for each garden which is why my gardening journal has few entries for 2015.
Notes on mom’s garden: 2015 was probably the last year that I will actively grow crops in mom’s garden (besides my well established asparagus, I also had gourds, garlic, and shallots). While productive, the soil in her garden lack nutrients and the plants were nowhere at prolific or strong as the ones in my boyfriend’s garden (he amends his soil regularly). I do plan to fix that for my mom in 2016. The biggest failure in her garden was the Amish Paste tomatoes (out of all the tomato plants planted, this one struggled with blossom end rot), though everything planted struggled with the exception of an eggplant accidentally purchased and planted. Eggplant flourished! The fruit trees need a good pruning and the strawberry bed needs some serious work.
Notes on Robb’s garden: Our lone peach tree and blueberry bush struggled so I will need to treat them both with fertilizer (they were both recently planted). His garden did amazingly well and I think that the chickens, even though they did tear up a few plants, helped the garden. The first picking of broccoli heads was great, though the second picking was infested with little green worms. All of the zucchini and summer squash did well until the squash bugs came (which I do think for 2016 we need another couple of plants). Squash bugs also wiped out our winter squash as well. Okra did fabulous and if we planted watermelon a month earlier, I think that we would have had a few to eat! We were overrun with Black Vernissage tomatoes, though the Better Boy and Early Girl plants just did okay. Tomatillos were probably the biggest failure, next to onions and cucumbers (which the chickens wanted to dust bathe where both of those were planted). Snap beans were great, though after the first two pickings, the plants were spent and should have been pulled up. As we move into fall, collards did wonderful; as did lettuce and our new broccoli plants are great. We attempted Brussels sprouts 3 times – two packets of seeds, a flat of plants – and none took.
For 2016, I would like to expand my boyfriend’s garden (just a few feet on one side) to take over some dead space that is a pain to mow. I also need to go ahead and get my garlic in to the ground (in the next week) and I would like to experiment with a few more crops that I’ve grown before, just not in a while (leeks, radishes, rutabagas). I don’t want to really plant more trees if we want to move in the next 5 years, but I may see what he thinks of establishing a small strawberry bed. The chickens have already torn up the flower beds in his backyard, so maybe I can make use of one of those.
What were some of the biggest failures in your garden for 2015 and what do you hoped to change for 2016?
