This was not a good gardening year for me. I planted a lot, and harvested very little. We had quite a pest problem, mostly of the deer kind, but also some woodchucks. It seemed like every time things would sprout and start growing well, they'd get eaten down to the ground. Then the plants would try again, sending out new shoots, just to get raided in the night and eaten down again.
Truthfully, other than a few select areas of the garden, I just kind of gave up after we got back from our Myrtle Beach trip in July. In fact, some parts of the garden got plowed under at the beginning of August because it was clear, at that point, that the plants were not going to have time to mature and produce anything even if the varmint pressure had been greatly alleviated by then.
For future years, we are going to have to take a hard stance on keeping the deer OUT of our garden. A mesh fence seems a simple solution, until you take into account the size of the garden (roughly 125' x 75'), the fact that deer can jump a six foot tall fence from a standstill (I've seen them do it at other farms), and the need to get a tractor and implements into and out of the garden in more than one spot (so, large gates that are also super tall and have mesh to keep deer and other things from crawling under or through the bars on the gate). Because there's no point in buying materials and putting in the labor to build a fence if it won't be impenetrable to the wildlife that we are trying to keep out.
Anyhoo, this is what we did manage to get at least a small harvest of:
Asparagus. The deer don't typically eat this, so we got to eat as much as I could remember to check on during the short and quick growing season.
Garlic. It was a really good year for garlic. Toad helped me cut the bulbs from the stalks once they were all dried down, and he was amazed at how big some of the garlic was. We chose the biggest heads of each variety and I planted those for my 2027 crop.
Onions. While they weren't huge, I did harvest almost every onion I planted. Especially the Red Rivers.
Cucumbers. For the first year in about four years, I had a good cucumber crop. Not huge, but enough that I canned enough pickles to get us through until next year.
Grapes. It was a big grape crop, although earlier than expected. DS2 picked about half to make wine with, and I missed the rest because I was too busy to get out there and pick them before the critters did.
Tomatoes. I got a very few tomatoes. Mostly the cherry/snack sized varieties, and really only about a dozen of those. My tomato plants got repeatedly eaten early in the season, even with tomato cages around them, and not very many of the plants recovered enough to even put out blossoms.
Green peppers. Same stoy as the tomatoes, only with less of a harvest. Four? Three? Peppers total.
Turnips. Far from a banner crop, my turnips actually did better than in previous years when I planted them. Most were not huge though; in mid-October when we decided to put the garden to bed for the winter I pulled what was left and came up with a couple almost-baseball sized turnips and the rest being a little bit bigger than a golf ball.
Potatoes. I feel like I really did my potatoes an injustice this year. I didn't get them hilled when they were supposed to be, and as a result they didn't produce much. Each plant gave me at least one potato, and some gave me four to six, but for the most part it was a puny crop. As always, the red skinned potatoes were the most abundant.
From a non-gardeners viewpoint, it looks successful! I love fresh onions - my mother would give them to me from her garden. Around the lake where we had property, the gardeners would plant marigolds around the fences. Apparently deer don't like the smell of them and they mosey along.
ReplyDelete