Things I learned from my garden this year
Another beautiful autumn, and as we transition into a season of bountiful harvests and active preparation for a restful winter.
The forecast for our first frost is tonight - so we spent the afternoon harvesting the last bit of our green cherry tomatoes (will see if I can make some salsa verde), a whole dozen zucchinis. the remainder of our bush beans (I’m leaving our pole beans to dry for seeds next year), made another batch of sun-dried tomato pesto with the last of our fresh Italian basil, and replanted our rosemary, thyme, and majoram/oregano into indoor pots with the hopes they’ll survive the winter and our inconsistent watering patterns.
The work’s not quite done yet, as we’ll need to clean the planter beds after the frost, plant our garlic for next year, harvest the matured beans for planting next year, continue harvesting our kale and mustard green and excitingly, pull up our first giant turnip! There’s still much to do, but the garden activities are slowing down, and I’ll absolutely miss the daily summer harvest where this is the first year we were able to get almost all of our daily vegetable out of the garden - and have plenty to give away to share with neighbors as well.
Chamomile. Plant once and they keep coming back.
Every year, I try to do some small experiment with the garden, and this year is not exception. Some fun things I learned this season:
This year, we attempted successive planting to make the most of our space. So when the lettuce began to bolt as the summer heat started warming up, we planted bush beans and zucchinis. Then again at the height of summer, we planted more zucchinis. This meant we had beans and zucchinis into the fall - enough that we’ve been eating zucchinis weekly and will have plenty in our fridge even after the frost tonight! In case I forgot to mention in earlier blogs, how this came about was us not having enough time to plant in spring so we basically emptied out our older seed packets on the soil before mulching in the fall and hoped for the best. This was 2-3 years ago and we’re still harvesting from that fall seed dump!
We intentionally (or unintentionally, hard to say since my work schedule was insane up until May) let some of our plants go to seed and create some volunteers so it cuts down on our planting time. All our spring lettuces, mustard green, chamomile, and kale are volunteers from having been planted years prior. This means a significant reduction in our planting time, since the only things I actively planted were zucchinis, beans, peas, tomatoes and herbs.
If you purchase your plants like I did for herbs - bury your majoram/oregano and thyme deep and it’ll flourish splendidly. However, this has no effect on rosemary and I wonder if it even might have stunted its growth.
Separately, planting a sprig of majoram/oregano that was kept alive in water last year, even though by spring it looked tragic and barely alive, still yielded a healthy plant by mid-summer, and it grew to around the same size as both when us starting from seed and when we bought the plant to re-plant, but no where as big and lush as the replant that got buried deep underground.
Chamomile will get everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE.
If you start your tomato from plant - larger tomato plants will give you an early start on cherry tomatoes and four large tomato plants will yield the equivalent 8 smaller ones and you have less to take care of. From now on, we’re going big or go seed.
Even if you had no issues with animals or pest all summer, that changes come fall when food becomes scarce in the forest. Expect visitors like squirrels for your sunflowers, deer for your kale, field mice for your beans, moths and caterpillars for your tomatoes, birds for the caterpillars and foxes and wolves for the mice, squirrels and rabbits. Circle of life and it’s one big harvest near the forest.
Definitely some great lessons I’m going to take into next year’s gardening, as we continue experimenting with new (lazy) gardening techniques. I’m truly grateful we were blessed with such abundance this year especially since this has been a plant it and forget it kind of garden, and will hope to share more (lazy) tips and tricks next year!
Side dish of sauteed kale from the garden with garlic and avocado oil
Late season harvest
The last of our zucchinis before frost tonight!