Friday, December 30, 2011

2011 tally

This year's harvest, other than perhaps the garlic, was pitiful. Mostly due to bunny damage, but also some weather issues and wrong-variety issues and lack-of-weeding issues.

The tally:

Extra-hardy garlic: 54 heads
other garlic (didn't count)

Onions: Just sad. The largest ones were about the same size as the smallest ones we'd harvested in prior years. The white onions were somewhat more successful; the bunnies seemed to prefer red varieties of both the onions and the swiss chard.

Ace peppers: Good numbers, some very large at the peak, but there were also some non-Ace varieties (including one hot one; surprise!) mixed in with the Ace plants.

Banana peppers: What I thought was a mild variety similar to banana peppers (b/c banana peppers were nowhere to be found) turned out to be a hot pepper. It was particularly loved by the bunnies, but came back toward the end of the season to provide hot peppers for Kevin.

Tomatoes: The Jetstars did quite well, producing early and consistently without being overly attractive to critters. The oxheart produced amazingly large (and tasty) fruits, but the critters (slugs, this time) agreed, and gutted them. The yellow pear produced well, but just didn't taste all that great. Next year: all Jetstars, all the time.

Sweet potatoes: considering that the bunnies ate the vines down to the ground several times during the season, we were luck to get a couple pounds of teeny-weeny sweet potatoes. They tasted good, though!

Butternut: 2 fruits. And they didn't seem to have a good shelf life. Mine started getting soft within a couple months. Still perfectly edible, though.

Swiss chard: slow to really fill out, and most of the red ones were eaten by the bunnies. Eventually produced a nice crop, only to succumb to critters again -- deer, maybe?

Zucchini: one fruit. Just enough to make a big batch of zucchini bread when a friend visited in July. I always aim to have just one zucchini fruit, and get dozens. This year, I actually achieved the goal, and then wished I had more, because I gave away most of the first batch of zucchini bread. Oh, but we had good amounts of yellow squash too.

Asparagus: Very nice crop this year. The new plants from 2010 are settling in, but weren't quite ready for harvest this year. Maybe in 2012. ETA: We spent about $80 to $90 for the plants and seeds that led to this harvest.