End of the Year Report: The Garden

An alternate heading could be: "All Things Plants" because I think I may attempt to touch on a few things besides the garden.

Okay, so the garden. It's been one of our greatest family joys this year. This has been our best gardening year yet. We produced more than we ever have before. Everything was bigger and more plentiful. Even our little herb garden beside the deck is thriving. This year I will even be able to harvest some herbs during the winter time. I've done that in previous places where we have lived. I've just dusted off the snow and cut the herbs for use in our Thanksgiving turkey. Pretty much everyday I've been running down to cut something to use for dinner. Mint, parsley, thyme, oregano, marjoram, chives. Life's grand when you've got fresh herbs.

putting the garden to bed for the year.

Where did we do well?

Tomatoes and peppers. Great. Nutmeg and I worked to pull off all the remaining tomatoes off the plants a while back. We filled over two 5 gallon buckets full. Many of them green or under-ripe.  Unfortunately, I was busy and didn't thoroughly research how to best ripen them and ended up having to throw many of them away. So that's a bummer. We still have a few peppers left in the fridge that we are finishing off.

Pumpkins. I am pretty sure that I didn't plant more pumpkin plants this year than last year. I think the ones I did plant were just very fruitful. (I must get better at journaling everything so I can keep it all straight from year to year.) We have baking pumpkins coming out our ears. Luckily no one has complained so far. Pumpkin pancakes, waffles, bread muffins, soup, pasta, sauce. You name it, we get pumpkin in it. We should be doing pretty well on the beta carotene this year. ;)

Beans.  We also had beans coming out our ears. I did my best to freeze as many as possible. I need to get the kids better at helping me keep them picked.

Eggplant.  Wow! Best eggplant year ever! Thoroughly enjoyed eating eggplant on a regular basis.

Kale, Cantaloupe, Cucumbers, Lettuce, Spinach, Peas. All very plentiful.

Areas that need improvement:

Keeping the perimeter of the garden week-wacked. It really tends to creep in and take over.

Onions. I have much to learn about growing onions. Next year I'm pretty sure I'll stick all the onions in the raised beds and plant them further apart. This is a big one because we use so many onions.

Potatoes. The potatoes grew fine but we just didn't plant enough of them. Next year.

Carrots.  Bigger and more.

Zucchini.  Zucchini are easy to grow. Hit and miss as to whether something attacks them or not (in my experience). We had a sufficient number of zucchini this year but something did get to them and totally killed off one plant.

Composting. We are really late in the game here. I think it really it the game winner for a wildly successful garden. We bought compost this year and it helped tremendously. But really, we shouldn't be buying it. It is free to make and most nutritious homemade. I've come up with a simple little system to start with this winter. We'll see how it works. Next year perhaps we'll come up with something new.

I have a small one on the deck like this that we are adding
food to from the kitchen. When it is full, we add it to this
one around back of the house. We layer it with straw.
Hoping it works out okay.

Raised beds. Hopefully we'll construct a few more.

Harvesting and preserving our harvest. This is the fun part but also quite overwhelming. This most definitely is the area that needs the most improvement. It is super tough for me to keep up on it all. Keeping it all picked, using it up, and making things to use during the winter. I'd like to can a lot of our produce but I just haven't jumped in feet first yet. But I've got young children and I really can't spend all my time in the kitchen. So I just keep telling myself that we've got a start. A little more every year.








New ventures this fall:

I shared a while back that this year I gleaned a lot of good information from the "Old World Garden Farms" website. These people (Jim and Mary) are amazing and I so appreciate them sharing everything they've learned the last five years on their property.

We learned some great techniques to make our garden more fruitful. One technique that I am trying this fall is to use winter crops to put nutrients back in the soil. Jim and Mary  recommend planting annual rye late in the fall just in time for it to start growing. The next spring you turn the rye over and then plant as usual. They have shared on their blog posts how they have witnessed the dramatic difference it has made in their raised rows. So we have tried it and our rye has come up nicely. We'll see how things turn out next spring and summer.


Garlic. This is my new baby. Or babies, I should say. I hope, I hope it works. We consume so much garlic around here. I've been buying local garlic at the natural foods store because I notice a huge difference between local garlic and the imported stuff. Jim and Mary share a short video on their site how to plant garlic. It is done in the fall in the midwest. A simple little process. So I gave it a whirl but in my mommy-busyness didn't get it in as soon as I had hoped to. I was worried that it was too late. I also was a bit concerned because I wasn't as faithful with the watering as I would have liked to be. Anyhow, God is good. The weather has been unbelievable. Rainy and then WARM temps. A couple of 70 degree days in November! Blessings. I waited with bated breath to see what would happen. Finally I saw some beautiful little green shoots pushing up through the soil!!  Wahoo! Grow babies, grow!! I'm not seeing that all of them are coming up but I'll take it. Something is better than nothing. So anyhow, the garlic will become dormant over the winter and then continue to grow in early spring. We'll harvest them late June or early July. I'm eager to see what happens.

garlic pushing through.

What have we been able to preserve?

kale and carrots

I should say first that besides herbs, we are still eating broccoli, kale, and carrots from the garden. So fun. So many good recipes for kale out there. The kids and I have drinking these delicious kale smoothies for breakfast (kale, banana, mango, lemon juice, lemon peel, ice, water).


We made lots of breads and muffins with our zucchini. Frozen beans. Freezer pear sauce and applesauce. Frozen strawberries (not from our yard) and canned strawberry jam (the only thing I canned this year). Small batch of refrigerator pickles. Freezer fresh salsa. Freezer cooked salsa. (I am finding I like the fresh salsa better than the cooked) Several batches of marinara. Ketchup made in the crock pot. (We still have a couple left to eat. Great over meatloaf.) Freezer pear jam. Freezer vanilla cantaloupe jam. That's it, I think.

That's it! Till the planning starts again late winter!



 **Quickly here. It's been great fun to be studying botany this year and also timely that the boys are taking a botany experiments class for our homeschool group. It all fits together so nicely. We've studied backyard medical herbs a little as well. Hopefully next spring we can vamp up the herb study.

Just today the three older kids and I finished up a germination experiment with bean seeds. They finished their measurements and recorded them in their nature journals. We noticed some neat things and were able to really talk about things we read about in our books, seen in our experiment, and witnessed in our garden. Some of the best things about homeschooling. Life's grand in this aspect as well. We are blessed!!