Summer Time Summary

Note:  Although his wasn't finished, but it does have some good information, so I will publish what is here.  It was written in September of 2012.

What a busy, fun, interesting summer it has been.  While not much has been going on in this blog, I have fortunately done better in the garden.  I did keep up with basic records on Sprout Robot, and while it is a good basic record keeper/indicator of when thing should be done, that's all it is.  Nothing is in order, and if a certain crop doesn't work out for whatever reason, there is no way to indicate that.  So, for my own mind, I will do a basic summary here.

April: Put in broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprout, and cabbage plants during the first week.  In the middle of the month, I also planted dill and started picking radishes.

May:  At the beginning of this month, I was able to start picking peas & lettuce.  For some reason, the peas did not do well this year.  They looked like they developed some type of disease and literally shriveled and wasted away.  The lettuce however did awesome, and I had a very hard time keeping up with it. (except the green leaf lettuce which never came up)

By the end of the month, the swiss chard was also ready.  It was really the only green that did well this year. The mustard, kale, collards and spinach hardly came up, and what did never grew very well.  I think some of this is due to old seed.  The spinach was also not in that great of soil.  Now that school was out, I was able to plant cucumbers, summer & winter squash, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant.

June: By the beginning of this month, the broccoli was ready to harvest followed closely by the cauliflower.  The broccoli did well.  I had plenty for a while and was able to freeze a little, although not nearly as much as last year.  The cauliflower would have done well also, but I was unsure about knowing when it was ready.  I let it go too long and it got blackish yellow on the top.  I just had to compost it.  I also put in cantaloupe plants.

In a couple of weeks, the cabbage was also ready.  I was able to make sauerkraut successfully from my own garden!  Again however, I don't think the cabbage did quite as well as it did the year before.

2012 Summary and 2013 Beginning

A lot of things happened in the garden last year.  Unfortunately, not a lot of it got recorded in the blog.  I would definitely say, though, that it was the best year yet.  We got tons of strawberries, leeks, onions, and tomatoes.  We even froze a bit of broccoli and peas.  There were lots of other things harvested as well, but no extra to save.  Unfortunately, the raspberries were taken over by weeds and didn't do more than leaf out.
I also managed to have a small fall garden last year.  The peas and greens didn't do that well, but we did have a lot of lettuce, which was nice.  I ended the year by planting  a half bed of garlic (Spanish Roja).

The garlic has been doing fabulous, and I am well on my way to a great crop in the summer.  I planted peas in late February, and the snow peas are about an inch tall now.  However, the regular sweet peas didn't really come up.  This packet of peas has had some problems even when I bought them last spring, and I have decided (for a few reasons) that I am going to switch buying from Pinetree and now order seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  This company is managed by a homeschool family in Missouri.  The seeds are closer to me (in the same basic zone), and they are all open pollinated (not Monsanto).  I am very late in ordering this year, but I hopefully will get to that this weekend.

I did order onions and leeks from Dixondale Farms in midFebruary.  The onions and leeks I ordered last year did amazingly well, and I was very excited to order the exact same thing this year.  Unfortunately, I got so busy that I was unable to put them in the ground until yesterday.  Hopefully they were not too dried out and will still grow okay.

I also prepped the bed that the brassicas will be in and bought plants at Ace yesterday.  I really need to work on mulching better, so the weeds don't take over in the winter.  (Although I did manage to cover my allium bed with fall leaves after the garlic was planted, and I covered this year's curcubit bed with black plastic to kill the grass that took over last year.)  My goal for this weekend is to get the brassica bed planted, weed the strawberry bed, and see if there is any hope for my rasberries.