Vegetable Garden Update and Report

We started off with high hopes for our vegetable garden. Visions of a plentiful harvest and canning tomatoes fueled me as I worked, planted, weeded and watered the garden. Here’s where we ended up.

Spring Harvest:

• Broccoli - The broccoli did surprisingly well. We harvested quite a few good sized heads and numerous side shoots for several weeks. I froze most of it, but the small amount we did eat was delicious.
• Cauliflower - These took a little longer to harvest, but I’d say they were also pretty successful. Each plant produced a medium sized head. I only had 2 of them, so next time I need to plant much, much more.
• Radishes - The radishes grew to perfection. My only regret was that I didn’t plant more. They were beautiful! These were the first vegetable we harvested, and it was really encouraging to get such good results.
• Lettuce - I sorta went overboard here. I planted 8 romaine lettuce plants. That’s way too many for our family of 3! We do enjoy a summer salad, but not everyday and that’s pretty much what we could have done with all the lettuce we grew. We gave quite a bit of it away to my grandparents and then ate what we could. Then the summer heat took over, and it went to seed.
• Cabbages - These took forever to harvest, but we did manage some small heads. Sadly, we did not eat them since at that point we had abandoned the garden due to our new cat using it as her litterbox (more on that in a bit). I grew the Early Jersey Wakefield and Savvoy Cabbage. Both seemed to do quite well.
• Onions - Ok, I totally failed on these. It wasn’t that they didn’t grow, they were just very very small. I really had no idea how to grow onions and also had no idea how to know when they were ready for harvesting. They became ready soon after our new cat took over the garden, and I assumed the fallen over stalks meant they were ruined. So I left them there. All summer. Lots of weeds. LOTS and LOTS of weeds. I think the biggest onion I got was 2 inches in diameter. I didn’t know you should cut off the flower stalks to encourage bulb growth either. But now I know! And next year I definitely will be trying these again.

Season notes: We had a very wet spring. The far left bed had trouble with water-logging, so we didn’t plant much there. Hardly any sunlight meant our crops were slow to harvest. But we didn’t need to worry about watering! Oh no- we had that one covered with the rain! This was a blessing since I was in my first trimester of pregnancy and constantly sick throughout the spring though.

Summer Harvest:

• Tomatoes - I planted 8 plants, but I didn’t get them in until nearly mid-June, so the transplants were a bit pot-bound and wilted by then. Nevertheless, I was determined since I really wanted to do some tomato canning come harvest time. Soon after the first fruits appeared, our cat arrived and we stopped watering the plants. Perhaps this is what did them in. Although they still produced quite a bit of fruit, they had all the signs of blossom end rot. Many of the tomatoes would not ripen either. We did manage to harvest some and cooked a brilliantly flavored tomato soup, but most of the fruits went to waste because of heat related diseases. By the end of the growing season, the fruits had all cracked – even the green ones. It was a very hard summer on tomatoes, and not watering them certainly did not help.
• Peppers - I think my biggest mistake with the peppers was not realizing how long it takes for them to harvest. I guess I thought that they would be ready with the tomatoes, which is not true at all. Only in the past week, in October, did I manage to harvest some decent sized green ones (the red ones never turned). I think perhaps the lack of watering had something to do with this as well though. The fruits were all misshapen too, which was really weird. I have 4 sitting in my kitchen waiting to be washed and chopped, so it wasn’t a complete loss.
• Summer Squash - I planted 2 plants, really thinking they would do well. How can you go wrong with summer squash? Well, once again, the horrible heat of the summer likely did them in without additional watering to help them. I harvested ONE squash. Two other fruits appeared and quickly rotted before I tore up the entire bed in preparation for amending the kitty litter soil.

Season notes: It was HOT. The fourth hottest summer on record to be precise. Little to no rain for long periods of time. It seems we got all the rain in the spring this year and none in the summer. Gardens did bad everywhere. Local apple orchards abandoned their crops completely. Farmers are in a bit of a bind from late planting due to the spring rains. So I feel better knowing I wasn’t the only one with troubles this year.

Fall Harvest:

• Turnips - This was the only fall crop I managed to plant. I even opted for a container rather than planting in the litter-infested vegetable beds. I planted in mid-September, a bit late for this area, but so far the frost has held off and Indian summer has enabled them to thrive. It has been a nice change of pace to grow in a container, and I’ve been sure to water them. In a few days, I will have quite a few turnip leaves ready to harvest, and I’m hoping by harvesting the greens the bulbs will be encouraged to grow. We’ll see!

Season Notes: It’s been a good season for fall crops, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to grow any more than the turnips. We’ve be working hard to construct actual raised beds in place of the vegetable garden beds and will be filling and cooking the soil over winter for a hopefully successful spring. We’re also trying to fix the cat problem by putting chicken wire over the soil for now.

How did your vegetable fare this year? Were there any challenges you weren’t aware of before? What was the biggest success?