2009 Season Summary

Despite the bad growing weather that wiped out virtually all of the tomatoes, we had some successes this summer.

Onions: about 200, some as big as half a pound

Garlic: about 30 heads of German Extra-hearty (and we saved 10 as seed for the 2010 season)

Herbs: all the oregano, sage, dill, chives and dill we could use. The basil was less prolific, but we don't use much of it, so it was sufficient. The thyme and rosemary were okay, but we should buy an extra plant of each next year.

Green beans: I'm the only one who eats them, and I only eat them fresh (not canned or frozen). We picked 4 to 6 cups, and probably could have had more if we'd picked them more frequently.

Asparagus: We were over-cautious in deciding when to stop harvesting, so we only got somewhere in the 2 to 4 cup range. We could easily have doubled that if we hadn't stopped picking so early. We could have eaten four times as much as we had!

Summer Squash: A mediocre year, probably due to the weather. Probably 15 or 20 yellow squash harvested. Many of the female flowers failed to set. The zucchini (which we like less, of course) was more productive. The same number of fruits, but on fewer plants.

Winter squash: These did reasonably well. About a dozen each of spaghetti squash and butternuts, despite both varieties getting a late start (again, due to the cold, wet weather).

Cucumbers: The early crop did okay (less than a dozen cukes, total) but petered out quickly, and the late crop produced only a couple mis-shapen fruits.

Peppers: These did great, which is surprising, since they're in the same family as tomatoes (and therefore at risk of catching the late blight that killed the tomatoes), and they also prefer hot, sunny, dry-ish weather. Before I stopped counting, we'd harvested at least 100 banana peppers from just six plants, and I'm guessing we had twice that many fruits by the end of the season, many of them made into pickles. The green peppers (18 plants, I believe) were equally productive and larger than usual, probably because of the extra water available to them. At the end of the season, after we'd already been harvesting a couple a day, on average, we picked at least enough to fill a five-gallon pail. And then after the frost, we picked another gallon or two.

The absolute best things to come out of the garden, though, were Jazz (calico in picture), Todd (orange in picture), Sophia (calico), Olivia (orange) and Moses (tiger with double paws). Yeah, I know they're not really garden-related, but they've lifted our spirits in a dismal growing year. Plus, if you look closely, there's celery printed on the quilt they're lying on.