It’s been awhile since I posted last. This wasn’t the best year for my vegetable garden, not awful, but not great. My gardening took a back seat this spring to wedding planning. As it turns out, wedding panning can be very time consuming, especially when you decide to do most everything yourself. I managed to get plants started in the greenhouse on time, but they got planted out a little later than they should have and not much time was spent on where and how to plant them. I started far too many tomato plants and gave more than half of them away to work colleagues and family and still ended up planting too many in my own garden.
Marketmore 76’ Cucumbers were my biggest success. I had five plants planted in a row along a wire trellis. They stayed neat and tidy and produced so many sweet, mild cucumbers that I had to pass many off to friends and neighbors. Unfortunately, as the summer got hotter and drier, they started to die off and were mostly finished producing by late July. I was also fairly successful with the Little Sweety Cantaloupes, which are very sweet little, softball-sized melons. The spaghetti squash I planted, thinking I was planting pumpkins, were heavy producers all season long.
The rows of tomatoes I planted produced very well and were healthy with the exception of a short spell of blossom-end rot on my Polish Linguisa paste tomatoes, but that cleared up after a few weeks. The problem was the lack of planning that went into planting them. There were too many plants for the space and they became crowded and entangled and looked a terrible sight.
I pulled the last of Genovese Basil out of the garden last weekend after a hard frost turned the leaves black. I will be adding the compost I made over the summer in my compost tumbler to the garden bed and turning the soil over on the next nice day we get to prepare for the winter. All transplanting has been done. Raspberries and shrubs have been pruned. Carrots, spinach and lettuce have been started for greenhouse growing through the winter months and so starts the winter gardening season (which is planned out better than the spring season was).
