Final garden update for 2009

Most everything in our garden has come and gone. We harvested all we could as the summer came and went and fall came a knockin'. This year's efforts were a mixed bag.

Here's what we did right:

• We planted a garden, well, two of them to be exact.
  
• We did not use any fertilizer or pesticides in our gardens.
• We planted and harvested a good number of vegetables and fruits.

Here's what we did wrong:

• We planted two kinds of peas too close together and they cross pollinated each other and neither grew like we wanted them to.
• We planted most of our tomatoes too close together and the yield was reduced as a result.
  
• We planted our root based vegetables in the wrong garden.
  
• We spent too much time and money starting stuff inside at the end of last winter/early spring.
  
• We didn't use raised beds in the main garden.

MVP's of this year's garden were:

• Cucumbers
• Peppers
• Some of the tomatoes
• Potatoes
• Watermelons
• Green beans
• All the herbs in Sparky's herb garden

Under performers were:

• all the varieties of squash we planted
• the carrots that never came up
• some of the tomatoes
• the peas
• spinach
• Swiss chard
• onions
• shallots
  

With our first garden under our belts we've learned a lot and we're making changes to next year's gardens even as I write this. I went and scavenged 7 weather beaten wooden pallets and I took 6 of them apart and I made some raised beds to put in our main garden:

The layer of rich topsoil in the main garden is very thin and under it is red clay, or as it's sometimes known in this area, red dirt. Lots of stuff had trouble rooting in this clay filled soil so we decided to go with raised beds. I still have to level out the ground and then fill the beds with bags of organic hummus and organic soil and mulch from our bins before we plant anything in them, but we've got all the rest of this fall, next winter, and early spring to do that. After we plant stuff like tomatoes, squashes, peppers, beans, peas, and other stuff in the beds in the main garden I'm planning on planting some nice looking ground cover plants between the beds, perhaps something like creeping Jenny or some nice hardy plants that can take lots of stepping on by fat bastards like me.

In the smaller garden, the space that used to be a rose garden, we're going to plant root based vegetables next year, things like potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, garlic, shallots, and onions.
The soil is rich and deep in this smaller garden and as you can see I've been removing the rotted out railroad ties and replacing them with a brick wall that I'm slowly building. The reason I say I'm slowly building it is because I can only haul 12 to 16 of those bricks in the Sparkymobile at a time. Plus, those things are fucking heavy. I'll also be adding a layer of mulchy muck from our homemade mulch bins and a few bags of organic dirt to this garden over the winter and early spring. The potatoes, etc., should really do well in that nice rich loamy soil.

I already miss not being able to go in my back yard and harvest some non corporate farmed food and I'm chomping at the bit to get next years crops in. Garden 2009 was quite a learning experience and hopefully we take the lessons we learned and make Garden 2010 a huge success.