A look back at Spring/Summer 2010

Hi, all --

Yep, it's a mid-month post from me...try not to fall over in surprise.

So...how did your spring and summer garden go? Success? Failure? Lessons learned?

Radishes: runaway success until the weather got hot. Fat, juicy radishes were SO good, and it was the encouragement needed to have something jump out of the ground so fast, so early in the spring.

Carrots: Delicious, but they took their own sweet time, and I got impatient and pulled them.

Corn: One of the few failures. Nice big tall, healthy plants, but of 6 ears that formed, I lost 3 to smut, one didn't develop a single kernel, one didn't develop enough to even bother cooking and eating, and the last one developed about halfway before something ate half of the developed kernels. I'll try again next year with a different variety - an early-season hybrid, which should help a little bit.

Basil -- wonderful basil...a little smaller than I'd hoped, but okay.

Pumpkins: Two small jack o'lantern pumpkins, neither big enough to carve. Vine succumbed to powdery mildew.

Broccoli: would have been a runaway success had I been here when it was ready to harvest. Instead it went to seed, and sent up a few anemic secondary heads, but not enough to even feed one person. (I munched one raw and it was tasty). Trying again for fall, and will plant again next year.

Green beans -- wonderful, but got lost in the tomatoes! I planted 1/square and should have at least doubled that.

Sweet peas - fabulous, bore plenty of peas...will plant more of those, too.

Tomatoes -- oh my heavens, the tomatoes. I had 4 6-footers just hanging heavy with fruit, and they were SOOO good! Wasn't paying attention and lost the whole lot to late blight, but late enough that I consider the tomatoes to be the biggest success.

Cucumbers -- developed 4 leaves, got to 3" tall, and stopped.

Watermelon -- 2 leaves and stopped.

Canteloup -- 4 leaves and stopped.

(Obviously there's an issue here with curcubits....will be doing some more homework over the winter and seeing what I need to do to get it up to speed next year!)

Lettuce: Dang the frat-boy slugs (tm) and the cutworms -- next year I spray Bt at the first sign of their rowdy hides, and probably put some food out for the resident hedgehogs close to my SFG. Everybody here kept saying to put out a dish of cat food or milk for them, as they like that in ADDITION to the slugs and snails...and I'm apparently a slow learner. The lettuce I had was delicious, though!

jalapenos -- are still under fleece, as I have 8 or 9 jalapenos that are still hanging tough...Hoping for salsa, even if it I have to buy tomatoes at this point. (Good news is there's a tomato grower at our local market).

Fall is a "hey, let's see what happens" -- I don't have any enormous expectations, so I can't be too disappointed!

My radishes, lettuce, spinach, and cauliflower are already sprouting...so we'll see how it works!

we've had our first frosts at night lately, here in Holland, so gardening will now officially be over, I guess...
have to run now, but I will be back to document my successes and failures this week, I promise

I should petition the Chinese to add a new animal to their zodiac. 2010 should definitely be known there as the Year of the Vole.

It was a rough year for us to be trying a new gardening method with high heat and humidity, drought, voles, and more insect pests than I've ever seen. Still, we had some great successes, including most of our early spring crops (at least the ones that the voles didn't get), summer crops of tomatoes, okra, sweet potatoes, catnip, zinnias, parsley, and watermelons, and a very happy fall garden growing nice crops of broccoli, collards, Tendergreen, mustard greens, green beans, radishes, turnips, basil, fennel, kale, arugula, head lettuce, nasturtiums, improved horticulture beans, and jalapenoes.

We had some so-so crops and some dismal failures, such as both early and late plantings of corn. But we are ever hopeful next year will be better.

"No more voles! No more voles! No more voles! No more voles..."