It was just OK. Tomatoes came in very late, but are producing now. Same with peppers. My wife planted some random seeds that were included in an order, and we have some very spicy peppers that we’re making sauces with. The squash was a bust, except for butternut. The plant died a little earlier than we would have liked, but we got a decent amount of usable butternut from it. Cucumber came and went pretty quickly. Beans didn’t do too good.
Yeah, can’t go wrong with tomatoes I guess heh. Our peppers on the other hand are struggling quite a bit, maybe try again next year… One or two squashes grew, they are kinda big though so it’s sufficient. Beans are good to grow I think, missed out on growing them this year but we’ll make sure to plant those too next year. Cucumbers didn’t grow also.
I think we never plant enough beans, so when some are ready, it’s not enough to make anything with them. I think you have to plant a few rows to really get anything out of it.
My first year, turned my lawn into rows by dumping a lot of mulched leaves on the grass and planting into it. No tilling, no amendments, no fertilizer. Very little weeding. I spent about 25 hours over the whole season on this project.
All in, got 150lb of veggies in 600sq ft of bed space.
Big Successes:
- tomatoes
- green beans
- pumpkins
- zucchini
- ground cherries
- turnips
Mild Successes:
- radishes
- cucumbers
- dry beans
- dent corn
- sweet peas
- basil
- sage
- sweet peppers
- bell peppers
- melon
Total failures (no harvest):
- chard
- cabbage
- kale
- brussel sprouts
- okra
- dill
- cilantro
- tomatillos
- hot peppers
I cleared everything out and planted a winter cover crop, hoping to improve the soil quality over the winter. I might take next year off also and do another rotation of soil improving crops. I don’t really feel like tilling.
Im surprised chard didn’t work well for you; it’s basically the easiest crop where i’m at. No pests, grows basically year round (i kept a plant going for 3 years), and not too sensitive to heat.
Same thing with kale, but that depends on the cultivar. Lacinato is really thick and waxy, so it handles cold and heat and drought well.
Peppers, from what i understand, are actually perennial plants that we just grow as annuals, so you really gotta start them indoors early. Hot peppers especially seem to be slow for me, but then one day I realize I have 1,000. You can actually prune them back and overwinter them if you don’t mind digging them up and have a place to store them.
The chard just wouldn’t germinate. Finally I got a few to sprout but they died off within two weeks.
The hot peppers were in 5gal buckets so I could start them early, but they just struggled so much and didn’t survive the transition from inside to outside. Funny because I did the same process with some sweet peppers and they all survived (but I only got a few peppers total from them).
Oh yeah, I also tried lettuce and spinach a few times, none got past an inch high before dying. I suspect that’s because these weaker plants don’t like being planted in a few inches of leaf mulch.
A lot of my failures are due to that it’s just the first year, and the soil was just chopped up leaves and rotting lawn grass with heavy clay below that. Next year I hope the soil will have improved and some things will grow better. I’ve got a mix of of buckwheat, vetch, winter peas, and rye growing in the beds now. I plan to kill that with a tarp in the spring and use the plant matter as a mulch. I hope this will help break up some of the clay and make it easier for the less hardy annuals to establish.
I have very little time to spend on it, so gardening is my super laid back hobby. I come out and putter around, but generally try to grow things with as little effort as possible using cover crops, no-till, and tarps to kill off beds that get too unruly.
Meanwhile I’m also working on perennials to add to the mix of low effort treats. I’ve got a quarter acre yard with a lot of thick clay, so every year is just a good chance to break it up with deep rooted crops and nitrogen fixers.
My dream is in 5 years I’ll have excellent soil for the annuals to thrive, and perennials producing more fruit than I can possibly eat.
Chard has weird seeds. They are usually multigerm (so multiple seeds in one), and the seed is chunky and I’ve found it often doesnt want to let the cotyledons out. I start my chard indoors, and if it sprouts where the seed essentially raises up out of the soil, I’ll just make sure to keep them moist by spraying with water, and sometimes I’ll use tweezers to remove the shell of the seed off of the seedling.
I’ve heard daikon radishes are a great plant to break up the soil since they get so big, and you can just let them rot in place. I’ve never grown any since I don’t own any land, and everything I grow is in potting mix or soil that I’ve purchased.
I did do peas and rye as a cover crop on some bigger planters this past spring, with the intention that I’d kill it off in sections as I planted stuff. That was a big mistake cause it’s pretty hard to kill rye like that. If i do it again, it’ll have to be peas with something else to provide some structure.
Nice gardening project for you then! You’ve also got a nice big haul from your crops which is always satisfying seeing your hard work pull through, plus it’s fresher. Shame about the others that didn’t work well for you but hopefully you’ll be able to try again next year and maybe it’ll grow then, climate/weather willing.
Oh I loved it, it was great fun!
I’m very excited to plant more perennials in the spring, this year I started grapes, asparagus, and ground cherries (I’ve heard they reseed easily so basically perennial).
I want to do more in the spring, thinking blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, elderberries, goji berries, maybe currants, gooseberries, service berries, mulberry, cherry, pawpaw, persimmon, and apple.
I figure if even half of that does well, in a few years I’ll be swimming in nightly berry desserts.
Maybe I’ll just improve the soil in the annual beds for at least another year before trying them out again. We will see
Tomatoes are finally getting ripe , just in time for an early frost to wipe them out.
Egg plant is finally producing a bunch of winners. I’m ready for some eggplant parmesan
Funny because we didn’t do as much this year due to bad rains and clean up from a terrible storm that took up a lot of time but I looked down and saw a watermelon vine growing a couple days ago. It must have sprouted from last year, I doubt it will produce but I’m going to let it grow .
It’s a strange year. Most of the usual invasives we have in our fields like Canadian thistle weren’t there but were replaced with 7’ tall “something or another” that I’ve never seen before and it’s everywhere dominating roadsides etc.
I’m getting ready for what will probably be another frigid winter like last year in the northern mid Atlantic.
All my tomato plants were eaten by deer. I tried to use spicy pepper plants as armor for the tomatos, but the deer even ate those back to get to the tomatos. Luckily, the peppers survived the original “pruning” and filled in the space that would have been occupied by tomatos, so I got huge amounts of peppers, now either fermenting or drying.
I grew tomatillos for the first time, and I didn’t really get the hang of growing them. I got huge plants with not much fruit. I think maybe it was a watering issue cause I was out of town when there were a lot of flowers, and i think they dried out too much and aborted the fruit.
I always get lots of chard and kale.
I’ve never gotten cilantro to grow well cause it gets too hot too quick. Most other herbs do really well.
Kentucky wonder pole beans did really well, as did dragons tongue bush beans. Scarlet emperor pole beans grew really well, and put out a lot of flowers for hummingbirds, but didn’t produce much.
Mustard greens always do well for me.
Lettuce, I usually don’t get much, but I apparently nailed the timing this year, and i got a bumper crop.
Im going to make an effort to actually plant some garlic this fall, cause at least that should resist the deer.
It’s been ok. I either need to cut down a tree or give up on vegetable gardening. I’m way too shaded.
Or I could rip out the shrubs in the front and plant vegetables. Not sure how that’ll fly with the neighbours!
That’s good to hear, the downside of wanting to cut a tree down is you have to pay someone to do it for you, but if you can do it yourself it’s even better!
On one hand they get mad that you ripped their shrubs, on the other, free vegetables! 😂
Fairly good haul of tomatoes. Not as good as it could have been, but certainly more than I needed. I still have extras that I’m going to turn into salsa tonight.
I hardly ever use tomatoes in cooking, so the ones I grow are almost the only time I use them. Which is good, because I’m starting to get sick of them!
Yeah, it was so so for me also, the tomatoes grew, 1 or 2 squash grew and one cucumber and a struggling melon that’s still trying to grow, also chili plants.
Built a little greenhouse in the spring, and planted peas, jalapeno, zucchini, cucumber, lettuce and… One pumpkin seed on a whim.
So, the pumpkin grew like Audrey 2 and choked out everything but the jalapenos. 😒 On the bright side, everyone in my office is getting a free pumpkin to carve this year! Whether they want it or not.
Nice going with the DIY greenhouse, kinda wanna make me make one now hah, we have a somewhat medium sized greenhouse that does the job as well. Trying to grow the last of the remaining sprouting basil and eggplant, probably too late for that but here’s to hoping!
We also have two kabocha growing and one melon that’s really struggling to grow, hopefully it grows well. Care to throw a few pumpkins my way? 😅
Our potatoes all failed, regardless of light and water levels, which is perplexing. Maybe too hot? Or a disease or pest?
Yeah our carrots failed on that part also, probs due to weather, weird climate and probably most likely irregular watering/feeding other than that some of our tatsois grow well and the tomatoes
Yeah, my guess is that they didn’t like the heatwaves. All of them turned yellow and croaked. Oddly, they did this at different times, and with different water and light levels. Even the ones in the shade that didn’t get as much water died, which is really perplexing. In past years, we had an overabundance of potatoes in the same area. (We kept digging up potatoes for years after our initial bumper crop.)
Oh well. We’ll try again next spring with a different variety and hope for better results. On the bright side, I’ve never had so many super chili peppers in my life. Someone liked the heatwaves!
