Let’s talk totals! In 2017 we grew a total of (drum roll please) 363 pounds and 6 ounces of vegetables! It was quite a drop from our 1147 pound harvest in 2016, but here’s why: -We didn’t grow any pumpkins. In 2016 we grew almost 400 pounds of pumpkins!-We didn’t grow any watermelon.-Oh yeah, we had a baby in July! Talk about a change in the growing season! Here’s a before and after…. from mid June to the end of July! Now let’s talk about what worked and what didn’t work… Success: We grew celery for the first time! It will now be a staple in the garden! Remember we were giving cauliflower one last chance this year? Well it must have heard us because we had our biggest cauliflower growing success! The potatoes did well! We had them grow in half a bed, but next year we’re going to grow an entire bed. Sugar snap peas produced nicely, giving us over 20 pounds. Roma tomatoes were the biggest yield from our 3 types of tomatoes we grow. I think next year we’re just going to grow 1 type of tomato as that’s what we love and can the most. The tomatillo plants did too good! We got over 50 pounds, which even I admit is too many tomatillos! The jalapeno plants did great! But again, we had way too many jalapeno peppers! Failure: Remember I was so excited to grow peanuts to make my own peanut butter? Yeah, that was a complete bust. One plant came up. I need to investigate this more. I shake my fist at you peanuts, I will be back! CORN! CORN! CORN! Ok so corn is a success and failure. Let me explain. We grew a entire bed of corn this year, it was going amazing, the ears were farmer market size and hands down the best corn we ever grew. We were feeling pretty excited! We checked it out one weekend and decided it needed a few more days to sweeten up. We could have picked it, but no, we had to wait a few more days. Well in those short few days, animals hopped the fence of our garden and destroyed about 100 ears of corn. It was a corn apocalypse. Want to see your husband cry? Watch him tell you his beloved corn got destroyed. We think it was raccoons. Our fence is pretty high, and nothing climbed under the fence. We at first thought birds, but these critters had some power to knock down the stalks. Anyways, it was a garden tragedy. We need to figure out how to solve this next year. The green peppers weren’t a complete failure. I mean, they did grow. But we haven’t had a massive green pepper in a few seasons so maybe it’s time to look for a new variety. When we grew them on the roof in buckets we had some big green peppers, but they haven’t been growing as successfully in the past few years. Does anyone grow in a similar climate and have pepper recommendation? One of my garden favorites, Brussels Sprouts, just didn’t have enough time to grow this past year. They did great in 2016 so I’m hoping they’ll be back this year! Here’s the numbers and full info! That puts us at 363 pounds and 6 ounces of vegetables (and one 7 pound baby) grown in Summer 2017! Hope you all enjoyed viewing the numbers… here’s good luck cheers to everyone getting ready to start their 2018 garden season!
