2020 Garden Thread.

[ness]

I got 10 years out of my raised beds, but the cedar is rotting out and it's time to start over. So, we pulled everything out and dismantled the beds over the weekend. No fall garden this year. 

Gotta say 2020 was a banner year in the garden. We had a great lettuce and radish harvest this spring. We planted Swiss chard again after a few years without it; figured out some better ways to prepare it and we really enjoyed it. Tomatoes were great until mid-summer, then we struggled with cracked fruit and later with something eating the good ones -- don't know if it was squirrels or birds. We were pretty tired of tomatoes by then so didn't sweat it too much. Still have dried tomatoes from 2019 so we didn't do any more. Peppers were great -- the best year ever. Did banana peppers and Jimmy Nardellos. This year we had really good numbers of good-sized thick-walled banana peppers. We like to stuff the bananas with sauerkraut and pickle them in a sweet brine. The JN's ended up in stir fries and we loved that. Lots of Dragon Tongue beans early on -- a delicious heirloom wax bean.

I gotta say I paid a lot more attention to the garden this year and it paid off. I was in a bit of a my funk before. Mulched everything with grass clippings early on, fertilized more, tended to things better, kept the fungicide on the tomatoes, just generally worked it like you should. We're looking forward to 2021.

 

[Fish24/7]

Not sure how long this is gonna last, plants are starting to show their age now.

[Terrierman]

I'm still getting enough tomatoes for our needs.  Everything else is way done.

[Fish24/7]

Today's harvest

[Johnsfolly]

@Fish24/7 you have had a haul on tomatoes. Looks like a farmer's market sale.

Our tomatoes went to the squirrels. They would grab the larger ones and eat them on the bird feeder ! Then we lost the plants during one of our trips to MO and everything dried out. Our cherry tomatoes are bouncing back and may get a few more from them. We do have some small acorn squash coming along and still have the hot peppers.

[Fish24/7]

They are already sold before I even pick em lol, 

They say homegrown tomatoes are hard to find around here right now. I've been supplying friends and family,locals, and even have a couple long distance customers who travel from Central Arkansas to get them. The year started out slow being weeks and weeks behind , maybe had 3.5" of rainfall all Summer , butthings are pretty good now the Belgium plants are loving these mild Fall like temps compared to 90+° Been dipping into the 50's at night. Need rain bad.

[Fish24/7]

9/21

[Johnsfolly]

35 minutes ago, Fish24/7 said:

9/21

Now you're just rubbing it in . You have had a serious haul this year. Definitely the reward of the work that you have put in to growing them.

[Fish24/7]

Those were today,not yesterday,  I had wrong date 🙂

[Fish24/7]

2 hours ago, Johnsfolly said:

Now you're just rubbing it in . You have had a serious haul this year. Definitely the reward of the work that you have put in to growing them.

Actually wasn't that good of a year because we had very little rain and I wasn't going to keep spending the money to water that many plants with city water which sucks anyway.

  Im just letting them finish up now instead of pushing them any further ,they are starting to dry up and I've  lost 14 plants this  month already. Have one more pull coming and that will be it for the year most likely. Average size was much smaller than in previous years too.

 Very thankful for what I got. But far from my expectations