2024 Garden

This was my first full growing season at this house and I think I did pretty well.

In March I put a rabbit fence around the garden plot perimeter. It's sunk into the ground about 6 inches which worked great, rabbits don't dig apparently. My garden plot is now 50 x 25 ft, which is big!

I also planted a dozen native flowering bushes, two apple trees (Golden Russet and King David), two Paw Paw trees and two gooseberry bushes.

I got cheap grow lights off amazon for around $70, which was a mistake! They work but not nearly as well as the grow light I borrowed last year. I also had trays going outside on top of my wheelbarrow which did ok. Those plastic covers ended up scorching the seedlings in direct sunlight.

My initial seed order, think this was from pinetree nursery.

My soil is what you would expect to be under a lawn. I did pick up a truckload of municiple compost for like $25. I also tried to mulch in place with pulled weeds, which I learned from @jjamgarden youtube. I think water retention in the soil is probably something I can improve a lot next year.

I have several compost piles cooking for next year which includes a lot of chicken manure. I'm also going to run a trial to compare how compost + biochar compares to just compost which I'm very excited about.

I marked 30 inch beds out with twine and stakes so things were pretty organized. I had a couple cattle panels for climbing cucumbers. I tried the florida weave (twine between posts) for the tomato rows but it didn't fully support them so I ended up staking each plant individually

costs and production

Once again very fun to keep a spreadsheet of what I spent and pulled from the garden. I'm probably missing a good $300 of water bill usage in the costs, but overall we ate a ton of produce. It's quite a lot of work just harvesting and prepping vegetables so not sure how much more produce I could handle but I want to push harder on things we love like cucumbers/tomatos/beets next year

Pests

Zero rabbit damage which was great. Squash beetles were bad, they carry a bacterial wilt that made it impossible to grow cucumbers after June. Not sure what to do there!

Squash bugs were on the squash and zucchini but (to my knowledge) they don't doom the plant and you can spray a badly infected leaf with a little soapy water. I did remove their eggs whenever i saw them.

I bought BT spray which is a bacteria that targets caterpillars and used it on the brassicas and it worked wonders, all of my kale was nice and clean the entire year.

Vine borer moths definitely got larvae into all the zucchini stems. You can carefully cut them out and pile soil up around the stem to keep the plant going. Next year I'm going to try wrapping the zucchini stems in foil.

I did see a few tomato hornworms but they had the parasitic wasp eggs. I also saw some assasin bug nymphs, so that's what I want to see in the garden - lots of benificial insects keeping the pests down instead of insecticides.

Vegetables

Salad Greens

Did three varieties of lettuce: New Fire Red (good), Ice Queen (was good in the fall), and All Year (got bitter easily). I'm going to try other varieties this year. I underestimate how quickly lettuce and arugula goes bitter so maybe I need a calander reminder every week or something.

We'll have a salad every dinner if possible and a lot of greens went into them other than lettuce including: arugula, beet greens, mustard, kale, purslane, thai basil, nasturtium, and fennel/dill.

'Goldgelber' purslane was the most exciting new thing I tried this year. Purslane is a common edible plant but the larger leaves and delicate taste of the cultivar were my favorite part of salads.

Garlic

The year prior I planted a bed of garlic, a hardneck and softneck variety, that did pretty good. I even saved some of it for this years seed garlic.

Napa Cabbage

6 of these did great in the spring, then I messed up the timing for them in the fall. They're huge and clean up really well. I like them raw as a salad but I bet they would be great stir fried

Green Onions

I had 4 patches of green onions throughout the year, so they were always available. I would just chop them up with kitchen scissors into whatever lunch I was making. They were great raw on tacos or fried with the protein. Once the chickens started laying eggs my go to lunch was scrambled eggs with hot peppers, green onions, and cheddar.

There's still a lot out there that I think are surviving the winter just fine.

Beets

A patch of 'Detroit Red' I planted in the spring did pretty well. I like the younger leaves in salads and when the roots are ready they're great. I love them cold with a little vinegrette.

Zucchini

'Cocozelle', 6 plants in one row gave me 26 fruit which is plenty. I like to make fritters with green onion which the kids like as well, also did a few loaves of zucchini bread. I want to try a lebanese variety next year.

Cucumbers

Star of the early summer. I did three varieties in one row: 'Homemade Pickles' gherkin, Diva which is like a smooth self pollinating slicing cuke, and Suyo Long which I thought had the best taste.

Green Beans

'Strike' bushing and something from last year I saved seeds of. I had ~1.5 row of the bush beans which was probably too much because I got tired of picking and prepping them towards the end.

Corn

'Honey Select', this was a lot of fun to grow but a single young squirrel chewed up half the crop so I probably won't devote space to corn.

Tomatoes

Absolute best part of the summer garden and they go from July until the very end of the growing season. I planted 22 plants in two rows:

• San Marzano - famous sauce variety
• 10 fingers of Napoli - another roma tomato
• Gardener's delight - big productive cherry tomato
• Marianna's Peace - large heirloom slicing variety
• Climbing Triple Crop - another large variety

I pulled a lot of fruit from these plants so I think they did pretty well.

At the start of the season I was pruning the suckers and keeping the vines around the fruit free of leaves. Eventually I fell behind. The Roma types got kind of messy. I found their fruit was pretty susceptible to damage/disease which gets way worse if there's no air flow. Cherry tomatoes have perfect fruit unless you get a heavy rain and they crack. The large tomatoes got pretty bad cracks but you can cut those out and they're still great.

I learned you can harvest tomatoes when they have like 10% of a blush and they ripen the same as they would on the vine, which is a great tip because you avoid any squirrel damage or whatever else can mess things up.

My favorite things to do with fresh tomatoes: sliced with salt and pepper as a side dish, BLTs, a fresh pasta sauce lightly simmered with garlic and basil, and caprese salad.

Peppers

This was another high point of the garden. I had 3 rows, 30 some plants. Here's my thoughts on the varieties:

• Corno Di Toro - italian frying pepper, very good but large fruit so each plant only makes a handful. maybe need a whole row of these to get the quantity we want.
• Shishito - A ton of fruit on each plant. Shishito fried in oil and salt is so good, such an easy side dish.
• Pepperoncini - Also a ton of fruit, very similar to the shishito. I tried water bath canning these but they cam out softer than you get in the jars. Maybe a quick pickle would be better. Nice heat level - I would throw a bunch in whatever lunch I was making.
• Mad Hatter - spindly plants, the fruit has a tropical flavor kind of like a habenero
• Jalepeno - 4 plants, I pickled a bunch. I let some ripen to red and loved it.
• Red Hot Cherry Pepper - you'll see these stuffed or in an italian spicy pickle with tomatoes. Loved them, my perfect heat level. I did a quick fridge pickle or threw them in jars with other types of vegetable pickles.

Okra

'Heavy Hitter' - I had a whole row. I adore okra, my family is warming up to it. This variety was good, I'm saving some seeds for next year.

I make Bhindi Masala and it's heavenly. I tried southern fried okra dusted in corn meal which was pretty good. Other than that I just fry it in my lunches. Maybe I don't need a whole row but it's hard because you have to pick the pods before they get too big and it doesn't keep very long in the fridge.

Herbs

• Cilantro - I had 3 patches and some loose plants. I want cilantro on everything and it bolts so quickly that it's hard to grow enough. I think I just have to be better with succession planting. I did save a ton of seed so I can do some more intensive direct sowing next year.

• Zaatar - I bought a variety of herb seeds but zaatar was the only one that survived well enough. I don't know what to do with it, the dried 'Zaatar' you buy is actually a spice mix. It was kind of like a mint oregano, it smelled amazing. I ended up putting it in watermelon lemonade, which made a lot of sense if you smell it!

• Italian Basil - we grow a lot. The plants keep producing leaves if you prune them and pinch the flower heads off.

• Thai Basil - Think this goes in Pho, it was good! Kind of an Anise undertone. I was putting it in salads.

• Dill - Didn't time it right for pickles but it went in salads which family liked quite a bit

Canning and Preservation

Canning is a lot of work but the results are genuinely treasured. It's also really fun giving them away to family/friends. I canned:

• Corriander hot pickles - I didn't have dill ready but they're delicious, maybe better.
• Bread and Butter picles - Followed a recipe, they're great next year I want to slice them thicker there's a recipe in my Appalachian cookbook
• Salsa - came out well!
• Red Pepper Relish - I kind of mashed up some recipes, it has corriander and celery seed spice. It's a little spicy and I enjoy it on hotdogs.
• Pepperoncinis - too soft
• Jalepenos - came out great there's always a jar open in the fridge
• Green Beans / Okra - with hot peppers, I love these on a lunch plate
• Crushed Tomatos - Just a ton of work not sure it's worth it

I also 'sun dried' a few trays of cherry tomatoes in the oven at low heat. It takes like all day, but they're really good! Great chopped up on pizzas or with olive oil & garlic on pasta.

Eggs

Ok not a vegetable but the Chicken Coop is right next to the garden so I would collect them along with vegetables. The chickens were laying around 10 eggs per day during the summer so we ate a lot!

I like them gently scrambled with hot peppers. I also got into french toast and Dutch Babies (pictured below)

Cut Flowers

Just Marigolds and Zinnias, but I found I really like having a vase of flowers around so maybe we'll try a few new things next year.

What went wrong

• Carrots - I just don't know how to grow carrots. I did get them to germinate with direct sowing this year but they never develop long roots
• Peas - they take up a lot of space and you get so few peas in return.
• Melons - all the plants died, probably due to cucumber beetle wilt
• Butternut Squash - did horrible this year, except for the one volunteer plant that came up in the compost pile. As I write this I wonder if the seeds were just not a strong variety. I did save the sees from the compost.
• Pumpkins - I planted a bunch of saved seeds outside of the garden, which grew but produced no female flowers. Maybe the seeds were from a hybrid?
• Eggplant - my Mom gave me a few plants but they produced pretty small fruit that I didn't harvest at the right times.

Plans for next year

Build a swinging gate for the garden fence. Build a rolling cart for outdoor seedlings. Invest in an actual grow light. Do a better job of succession sowing lettuce & cilantro. Organize tomato and pepper plants better. Eat more vegetables, somehow.