I have a love/ hate relationship with our small garden. Last year was it's first year and I went crazy and over-planted everything.
Who needs more than one zucchini plant?!
It had issues. I really loved giving produce away. It made me feel like a good neighbor. But I hated how much got wasted. I filled a 5 gal. bucket with bell peppers, chopped them up, and froze them. Let me tell you, there are 0 recipes that call for thawed, slimy, limp bell peppers. I left the onions and carrots in the garage over the winter and it ended up hard freezing in there. Tossed them out! I couldn't get my Anaheim peppers to roast correctly. Blah! Tomatoes? I spent all day making red sauce and only came out with 4 jars! We did have some success: fresh lettuce salads with every dinner (until it got hot), sugar snap peas all summer, butternut squash pasta, and lots and lots of zucchini! I was actually looking forward to frost.
2014. New Season. Fresh Start. Clean slate. Tilled Dirt.
Once again, Projects Connect has motivated me to do something quickly! As with common practice, we were outside, on the last day of our deadline, planting the garden.
Midnight Landscapers Strike Again!
Good thing the headlamps had fresh batteries!
I'm not one to "hand-water" anything! If it's not on a timer, it will die. Last year, we used soaker hoses with our system, but they all excreted water at different rates. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Some things would get lots of water, and others would hardly get any. It was part of the reason I had varied success. This year, I bought pressure regulators and Netafim emitter tubing. Unlike soaker hoses, these have holes every 12" with a standard flow rate (.6 gallons per hour). You plant seeds NEAR the holes, but not directly under them. You can plant seeds already thinned out to 12 inches. Brilliant. Good thing I had 2 weeks to monitor the success before this posting was due.
So far so good.
Midway is technically zone 4. There are some things you HAVE to start inside earlier, like tomatoes, chili and bell peppers. These take forever to ripen! I have a sunny window sill that housed several narrow seed trays over the spring. I get ansy and start my seeds in February. Too soon. The starts are screaming by the time they're transplanted. February is just so bleak there needs to be some life! Anyway, I hope this year I can better manage my crops. I need to study more on preserving and canning. Maybe the ol' garden will be more productive!
4 comments:
Your garden looks amazing! and by the sound of the write up you learned a lot last year to apply to this year, we can only expect great things. Hurray for projects connect to get done what we meant to do anyway. Thanks for the write up! Holli Gunther (from projects connect) and her husband do a large garden every year. Her August or September goal has something to do with preserving the fruit of the vine!
Awesome! This Vegas girl has garden envy.
I love your hose setup. Every year I complain to my husband about having to water by hand ... every year I do it anyway. Why don't I apply the energy I spend complaining to just get a drip system in place? Aaargh!
I feel ya on the waste/preserve battle. My September project is to give myself an afternoon deadline to process that morning's harvest -- or else give it away that night. I actually use frozen peppers all the time. They work great for me in recipes that call for cooked peppers, like mixed in with hamburger or in spaghetti sauce. So don't give up!
Yay for gardening! I'll need to harness some of your skills to keep my garden going this year.
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