Select Page

This summer was a mix of success and failure. I did very well with tomatoes—I got three starts from a neighbor and they all produced well. I also got some tomatillos from a friend and they also did well.

I also got a lot of garlic. Easy! I had heard garlic was hard but I planted the cloves and got a bunch of small but lovely and tasty heads.

I was going to do well with Kale, but the deer got into the garden and ate all the kale down to nubbins!

I planted a lot of strawberries, but the deer also ate them so I didn’t get that much fruit, plus I struggled to find the right protection from the birds. Next year I’m going to make lightweight netting covers using PVC pipe and netting attached so it’s easy to remove the covers and also to keep the netting tight.

My raspberries got root rot. Ugh! I pulled up the ones that outright died, and the rest I trimmed back a lot. My plan is to clear out the leaves and detritus from the bed very thoroughly, compost, and mulch heavily for winter, and keep my fingers crossed. We will see.

Blueberries did great, they are composted and mulched for winter already:

Didn’t have too much luck with chard, but have one plant doing well and one plant going to seed nicely so am waiting to collect seeds:

I got a few potatoes, and am hoping for a winter harvest. I have a couple in the ground now, one of which is growing already, and will be picking up some more seed potatoes to plant in the next few days:

Apples did well. I thinned properly this year which helped and so got bigger apples and fewer of them (thank god). Lesson learned about thinning! I’m careful to pick up all fallen apples to feed to the deer, and leaves to compost separately, so the apples don’t get scale and so far that is working. However, the flies and wasps seem to be loving the apples so after a couple of good harvests, the remainder of the apples seem to be being eaten on the vine by insects:

I got a lot of asparagus but most of it too thin to harvest and it all went to seed very quickly. Not sure if that was because it was a hot dry summer? I need to investigate a bit. I have the asparagus composted and mulched for winter:

In the other half of that bed, I just planted a late fall/early winter drop of cabbage, onions, chard, and spinach. Fingers crossed! I used “farmer’s blend” from the store as the compost I got from Sweetgrass still needs to break down a bit. That black gold is going on the beds that will over winter.