Summer Garden Recap

My food growing was a disaster this summer. At least that’s how it felt as I surveyed the mass of weedy overgrowth this evening. I put all my energy into the new pond and quail keeping, and I let the weeds run amok and didn’t feed the plants or top off compost as I should have. For my future self, I’m documenting the season and will start with the positives because no one likes a whiner.

Wins

One apple tree out of three and one pear tree out of two finally started producing just a few but still very exciting fruits.

One really good peach tree yielded 35lbs of peaches. It’s either a red haven or Georgia Belle.

Peppers grew and still are growing great. I froze a pan of sliced sweet and mild peppers to use in hash browns. I also dried enough to restock my special spice blend of dried cherry tomatoes, medium and hot peppers, garlic powder and salt. I’m waiting for the Cayenne to come in for crushed red pepper. As such, I’m keeping all the current varieties on my forever list – banana, cubanelle, cayenne, jalapeño, yellow elephant, Big Bertha (from transplants), California yellow bell (okay mane not this one), and Ajvarski. They can handle some shade, never get disease in my garden, can tolerate if not prefer the heat, and don’t experience water stress as badly as tomatoes. I highly recommend Ajvarski. It is sweet, thick walled and flavorful.

I harvested enough tomatoes for canning sauces and diced tomatoes and chilies and froze a gallon for more sauce making before most vines were lost to disease. I still need to pull them out for curb pickup. The cherry tomatoes are still going nuts and really do have flavor superior to the beefsteaks. I also managed to keep most plants properly labeled. White Tomesol was such a good grower and seems disease  and bird resistant!

It looks like it will be a bumper year for hazelnuts, so I need to be sure to collect them before the squirrels get them and figure out a fun way to use them.

The basil is small but steady this year. I split up a pot from the grocery store as none of my seeds made it. I’ve made a few small batches of pesto and still have time for more. I rooted basil cuttings in the bog filter which did wonderfully!

Tomatillos are a win-waste. They grew; I let them rot on the counter.

Cucumbers grew, though not abundantly, and the quails loved them.

Shout out to the figs.

Losses

The muscadine vine is loaded with grapes that are hard little diseased nuggets, and some of its leaves are crisp on the edges. I think the vine is catching herbicide drift from the neighbors’ lawn treatment, but I’ll keep the vine and hopefully a privacy fence will protect it next summer. Right now, it’s serving as a protective barrier for the veggies.

We essentially got no blueberries or blackberries, thanks to birds.

We grew no edible plums and have one ripening pomegranate. The trees are all still young and look mostly healthy.

Some of my tomato varieties were super disappointing. The Oxheart pink that was so unique last summer didn’t look or taste like Oxheart pink this summer. If I grow it again, I will try with fresh seed from a good seed company and not from what I have in storage. I suspect I grew seed that hybridized rather than the original. A couple of the beds struggled as a whole, which leads me to think the plants aren’t to blame but the soil is tired. Healthy soil makes happy plants. It could also be the plants in the sad soil were shaded out during what should have been their early growth thanks to some overgrown fennel. My favorite tomato, Big Beef, tried so hard and tasted delicious, but the soil born diseases got it too eventually and limited its production. I will never grow Cherokee Purple again (hold me to it). While it’s a favorite of so many gardeners, it just can’t hold its own in my garden. Actually, no potato leaf tomato did well for me.

The tomatoes grew in the bog filter but were bland. The constant water must have diluted the flavor.

It took so many tries to get the okra started this year! I blame the chickens. I still haven’t started harvesting any pods.

I waited too long to start beans and still haven’t harvested any.

Insects absolutely destroyed the kale.

The corn looks tiny, but the results are not in.

The garlic failed to thrive, and I had to harvest it too early.

Onions, tiny.

To Future me

Please for your sanity and the love of homegrown tomatoes, just stick with the ones that work. Give the others a rest. In fact, give your soil a rest and grow outside the fence for a year or three. I get that it makes you feel special to grow 28 varieties, but seriously, bagging rights over bragging rights. Am I right? It’s better to have fewer, healthier plants (and a harvest) than a diverse multitude of suckitude.

Skip the Orange Hat, Lil Bites Cherry, Tasmanian Chocolate, Persimmon, Black Russian, Black Krim, Red Brandywine, Crimson Carmello and Chianti Rose. You don’t actually like the Black Cherry, so skip that too. Skip planting the Matt’s wild cherry because it will plant iself.

Stick with the Renee’s Garden tricolor cherry tomatoes (garden candy), which treated you so very well and were resistant to Fusarium wilt, tomato wilt virus and verticillium. Keep growing Big Beef, White Tomesol for your neighbor who always requests a plant, Red Kiss and Tangerine. Grow the Romas if you must, just know that Rosa Maglia is fair maiden will be the first to complain.

Don’t let that vine weed on the trellis (I know you’ll be tempted by the cute blue flowers) or the other vine weed that pretends it’s a muscadine (porcelain poser) or that sprawling weed with the cute purple flowers get a foothold. They are all evil and invasive. The native sensitive pea can stay.

Feed the garlic so the garlic will feed you.

Don’t trust the squash volunteers under the trellis. They are essentially free-range kids terrorizing the neighbors while their mama is couched and passed out to murder podcasts.

If a fruit tree is dying, fell that sucker. A tree this year is half a truck load to the city yard waste. Next year it will be two truck loads.

Look for that new grape vine that was swallowed up by weeds and give her some love. She needs to be seen to thrive.