Garden and Gears

2015: Final Result

Posted on February 15, 2016

My 2015 garden did well. Almost too well. Between managing the garden, doing 60-75 mile bike rides on the weekend, and planning for my wedding, I dropped the ball on updating this blog. The garden took a few hours to a full day every weekend, plus at least one mid-week session to pull down invasive bind-weed.

This was an average daily haul starting in July.

The corn lasted 2-3 weeks, I got around 60 ears (40 plants with some producing 2 ears). Around 75% were well formed, the rest were franken-corn, and got boiled and frozen. This is just due to them not getting fully fertilized.

The tomatoes and cucumbers lasted until late August, when our house-sitter forgot to water the garden for the 2 weeks we were out of town for the wedding. Whoops. Some of the tomatoes survived, but the cucumbers were fully killed.

Here are some final pictures:

Lessons learned for next year:

1. Cucumbers take over the whole garden, so next year I may plant less. I ran out of ways to eat 4 cucumbers a day, and this is coming from someone who loves tomato-cucumber salad.
2. Tomatoes need deeper soil. Mine did well, but not awesome. The 2 I planted in deeper soil produced buckets of tomatoes. Same holds true for carrots.
3. I don’t need 6 hot pepper plants. 4 would be sufficient for my needs.
4. Weed often. When I’d miss a week the bind weed and bermuda grass became almost uncontrollable.
5. Corn fields are awesome!