above: future carrot seeds.
a lost butternut squash that made its way into a flat leaf parsley patch.
overall, the over riding theme of this years garden was big fat failure.
i blame this on my loss of my garden journal from 2010.
sidenote: i have always used artemis factory's gear notebooks for my garden records. with just 40 pages, they worked beautifully for keeping my records. now the store that i buy them from here in knoxville closed. and to top it off, i cant find a single supplier online. to give you an idea of what these notebooks are and look like, there is a post about them here.
those people are serious about their fountain pens.
back to my story of loss. i have several of these notebooks. and each one has certain info in it. one is knitting info, one is sewing info, one is garden info. i vaguely remember the last time i saw it, and upon further tearing apart of my house in march, i can not find it. i had drawn a little pea on the top right corner. and now? gone forever.
therefore, when we were planning planting and procuring seeds for the coming year, i had no reference of the years past aside from my pictures from my camera.
i have started a new garden journal, but in the event that this one gets misplaced by the evil journal snatchers, i guess i can go by this post? if only i blogged more.
so here is the report from this year.
we started 20 heirloom tomato plants very early this year in april. cody built a makeshift greenhouse over one of our raised beds. they did beautifully! The polish linguisa was my favorite this year on account of its awesome tomato sauce making qualities.
our early garden was as follows: tons of radishes, carrots, and spinach.
green beans were but a faint glimpse of what could have been. which made me equally sad.
our early potatoes did fairly well, but we need to order fresh seed potatoes this year. the 4th generation seed potatoes are not seemingly as effective.
cucumbers: get more plants. 6 is not enough. and trellis from the beginning.
last year i cursed the amount of kale that we grew. i vowed to no longer grow kale. who does that?? i missed the kale something fierce. next year? 20 pounds of kale! at the minimum.
every year we have peppers upon peppers that i freeze. somehow, we have no peppers this year. all of our plants died, and we only planted 4 as opposed to our normal 10-15. next year: i call for more peppers.
the beets tastes straight up delish. more beets more beets!
sweet potato takeover.
one word for my future self regarding squash. thin those seedlings and trellis. goodness. i thought squash was easy!? i had dreams of being overrun with a big beautiful bounty of delish butternut! how many do we have? 3!! blah.
our little raspberry patch seems to be doing just fine. however, none seem to make it inside the house.....
i have been reading the new organic gardener by the famous elliot coleman. he has assured me that the answer to most of my problems is to plant a cover crops this winter and till it in come spring. i would stand on my head and do say squash 40 times if someone told me that i would be able to produce more food, so cover crop, here we come. we are ordering our cover crop from here.
we are going to plant a small winter garden with a makeshift greenhouse covering. spinach, carrots, kale, lettuce,beets.
our one win for this year was my committment to supporting as many u pick farms as i humanly possibly could. around east tennessee we have several good quality U-pick farms. strawberries, peaches, corn, blackberries, broccoli, yes please!
stickers from here.
and all is not lost considering i am holding my standards for my garden at the illusive hoarder status. which is what i have turned out to be. a food hoarder.
