Vegetable Garden 2024
Better late than never. As I look outside at the
beautiful clean snow under a full moon, I realize that posting about my
vegetable growing season in December has been a familiar sentiment for
2024. I feel like I have been behind or tardy on many things this
year. Alas, another vegetable growing season has gone by and what are the
lessons I learned this year? First, I need a greenhouse; so plans are in
place for me to build one in the spring/summer. A greenhouse is essential
in the shorter north season to give plants like tomatoes and peppers an earlier
start. In addition, I need to design a future garden in which I can cover
more delicate plants easily in case of frost – I am not sure how that will look
at this point. On June 11th we still had frost and then for two nights
the last week of August. Part of the early frost is due to my location at
the bottom of the valley; the folks on the top of the hill were spared having
frost so early/late.
In June my tomato plants died back from the surprise frost
but then revived. I made attempts to save the tomato plants from the August
frost by wrapping old bed sheets around the plants and since I had three old
sheets and 14 plants it is needless to say, most of them perished. I was able
to put pails over my pie pumpkins to save them and made a delicious pumpkin pie.
In the end I had several cherry tomatoes that I enjoyed and a handful of
roma and beefsteak tomatoes. Then I received a pail of roma tomatoes from a
neighbour which I jarred for use this winter.
My potato plants were generally a success - measured by more product harvested than planted, yielding about 50 pounds. I did not get the monster potatoes from last year but that's ok by me. In harvesting my potatoes I discovered a lot of buried pieces of partly decomposed chipboard in the soil which could have hindered the potato production. A bonus was my potato plants did not have any potato beetles, unlike my neighbours on either side who both had plenty of them. Maybe it is due to all the tansy plants I have growing in my fields, which are supposed to repel the beetle; or maybe because I planted my potatoes late.
My carrots did well and I left many of them in the ground
until late November. The exposure to days of frost made for sweeter carrots and
what better place to store the produce than in the garden, freeing up needed
room in the refrigerator for other things. Digging up carrots under a layer of
snow was a bit messy and cold on the hands but I would do it again. The carrots
were planted on a bit of a hill so when we had many days of rain at the
beginning of November, and the rest of my garden was under about 2" of
water, they were spared. The only other thing that was left in the garden at
that point was some kale plants for the chickens, which were ok for a few days
in the water. The water table here seems to be very high, however also drains relatively
quickly, except in the spring while the ground is still frozen. Adding more soil to the garden to build it up
should help keep the vegetable plants from potentially drowning.
Garlic plants do not like too much water. This fall I made a built up garden for my garlic, after drowning my garlic that was planted in the fall of 2023, and I planted 200 garlic cloves to harvest next year, enough to share with friends and neighbours.
Onwards and upwards in the garden adventure. Despite all the chipboard, glass, cement pieces, nails, garbage, rocks and bones that I am digging up I know that some time in the future all the effort will be worth it and I will only need to worry about removing weeds.
Other things I have been up to this summer and fall:
I started working on clearing the cement pad area between the garden and the shop.
BEFORE:
Redoing the roof on the Bunkie.
BEFORE:
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