weighing in

While some gardening enthusiasts are still growing leafy greens and brassicas, my growing season has come to a close. After a resounding success this first year, plot 63P was officially shut down for the long winter on November 2nd. There is plenty to cover about the plot and its contents in retrospection. Out of the last 3 years, this year has been my most serious attempt at gardening which has led to both the most work and the most education from mucking about in the dirt.

In life’s retrospections, sometimes there are moments of regret and moments of rumination on the things that we would’ve, could’ve and should’ve done in the past. Not finishing those chores on the weekend. Not reaching out to that old friend. Not taking timely pictures of your family in special moments. Not recording the exact weights of those 28 cherry tomatoes on a random afternoon… Ok I shoehorned that last one in, but only to pat myself on the back. At season’s start, I remember thinking that weighing yields for a blog post about total harvests might be a good idea to have at season’s end, and I’m happy to announce that I did indeed do that thing!

Throughout the growing season, Morgan and I did our best to record the weights of many of the crops harvested out of both 63P as well as some here in the yard. A few yields were not weighed either due to the difficultly of capturing said weights, or because weight wasn’t the best indicator of total yield. I could gloat about growing a hundred pounds of zucchini, but that’s only because they were harvested mid-size. If I simply left them on the vine then I could instead gloat about growing a thousand pounds of inedible zucchini. Suffice to say, care was taken to measure produce that ripen fully on the plant before harvesting, rather than those fruits that would just continue to grow if left alone.

Looking through my notes though, I’m pretty proud of the data that was collected for many types of produce this season, and I’ve done my best to capture and convey this information into digestible bits below. Each yield has a calendar graph showcases it’s planting/growing/harvesting season (as they were logged in my notes) as well as a total yield. My goal was for this to be a foundation of knowledge and comparison for determining yield successes and yield failures as the years glide by. Let’s get to it!

Marionberries (perennial)

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yield: 12 lbs 13 oz (5801g)

The blueberries are the longest standing perennial berries in the yard, and they’re the family favorite. There are currently five well-established blueberry bushes living, breathing and fruiting in the yard. I don’t know exactly what varieties they are but my best guess is some kind of highbush variety. One of the bushes produces a larger blueberry than the rest of them, but it’s not as flavorful. Time will tell if we end up culling that bush in favor of something new. Regardless, in total almost 13 pounds of blueberries were picked this summer which was more than plenty for the two of us and enough to share with visitors. Interestingly enough, the blueberry harvest window was almost double the length of the Marionberry harvest window.

Morgan processed the blueberries similar to the marionberries. Essentially a quick wash, removal of any stem bits, and then tucked away into the increasingly-short-on-space freezer. We are finding ourselves more and more concerned with freezer storage as we continue our gardening hobby. There is so much we could process and freeze over the season but we don’t have a dedicated freezer to encapsulate it all. Similar to the marionberries, we prefer freezing the bulk of the blueberries for oatmeal and the occasional fruit crisp, one of Morgan’s homemade specialties.

For the time being, berries continue to obscure themselves within my blind spots of knowledge. There’s only so much time in the day to dedicate to the sport of edible things, and I spent the majority of it tending to other non-perennials in the yard and plot 63P that required more immediate attention. I am however starting to focus in on the general lifecycle of these fruits and their various needs throughout the season (and care during off-season). Any perennial fruiting plant is a gift that keeps on giving, so devotion and attention to their care is important and worthwhile. As I become more efficient in the world of annual produce, I expect to tend to the world of perennial produce more as time goes by. One technique learned this season with the berries was the budding art of bamboo trellising, and I think I’ve got a better grasp on how to iterate on this aspect of their care next year.

Cabbage

Enough about the yard for now. Let’s hop over to plot 63P and discuss one of its very first occupants, the cabbage. Cabbage is one of those foods touted as being packed with nutrients, specifically vitamin C. Fun fact: the Romans believed cabbage cured hangovers. I wouldn’t go that far, but I do believe it’s 💪🏼NUTRIENT 💰 RICH folks. Of course I had the desire and fantasy of sprinkling it on some homemade deep-fried fish tacos in the name of health, and then rewarding said healthy choices with a celebratory pint of Ben & Jerry’s. Wahoo!

I often succumb to the bombardment of researching plants before sowing to ensure I’m following the de-facto “rules” around how to plant, how to grow and how to harvest each one properly. I think it’s the engineer in me that pulls on my brain-strings to seek out ultimate growing efficiency. In cabbage’s case, I decided to exercise a different mental muscle; the “being OK with chaos” muscle. Instead I would simply plant and observe. Aside from researching how to make my own seed starting mix for the cabbage starts, the only fact I knew about cabbage (aside from the crazy Romans) was its ability to handle cold temperatures. So, I started them very early as you can see in the chart below. Since this was going to be a wild card crop, I dedicated 8 square feet to 2 cabbage plants and then sat back to watch what happened.

Amaranth

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yield: 2 lbs 2 oz (970g)

My favorite cabbage of the season was the Amaranth. Once it got going, it looked pretty nifty, dare I say ornamental in the plot. An underrated and endearing aspect of growing cabbage is watering it, because the leaves act like Teflon. The water just beads up and drips down the leaves, like trying to water a shower curtain. Although the leaves were mostly green, the veins on this variety were purple, which signaled the color of its contents. In the end, the head ended up being a bit bigger than the Primax variety below, but since cabbage heads can weigh anywhere from 1-10 lbs, I’d say this one was still on the smaller side.

Primax

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yield: 1 lbs 13 oz (825g)

The Yin to the Amaranth’s Yang, Primax brought balance to the cabbage harvest with its classic green color all the way through. This one was slightly smaller than the Amaranth, but you couldn’t tell really from its footprint within the plot. Foreshadowed above, this cabbage’s ultimate purpose in life was indeed to garnish fish tacos for a summer Oregon coastal fishing trip I took with a group of friends. I’m also proud to say that almost all of this cabbage was used, as the outer leaves were great embellishments that my rabbit Vanta snarfed up happily.

Winter Squash

Throwing an “Aaron’s first” into the mix was this year’s winter squash. Up to this point I had never grown winter squash before, and only had experience growing summer squash (zucchini) once in the last three years of gardening. This past winter I read a couple chapters in a book about winter squash and it intrigued me. The fact that they could keep so long in storage after harvesting and still be edible allured me enough to peruse through online seed catalogs to hunt for some winter squash varieties to try out on my own.

I’m still trying to get to the bottom of why storage crops interest me so, but it may not be a very complicated reason. The ability to answer the question “what should we have for dinner?” in the doldrums of January with a big homegrown butternut squash from the past summer is a delightful thought.

One can be warned again and again and again about how much space squash takes up, but experience is always the best teacher. I’ve now officially internalized that fact after cultivating my own squash from my own squash jungle this summer. I’m pretty sure at some points my plot 63P neighbors would just see my floating head bobbing around the foliage during the peak of the winter squash growing season. As overwhelming as it was at times, the winter squash yields convinced me that they’re worth growing again, albeit in a bit more orderly fashion.

One interesting insight I’ll leave you with, and one that applies to all the winter squash below is that when curing, they lose weight. I noticed this by accident after re-weighing a squash and noticing it wasn’t correlating to any of the weights I had weighed a couple weeks prior. The lost water weight isn’t a large amount, maybe 5%, but still noticeable on the scale.

Kabosha (Blue Kuri)

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yield: 7 lbs 4 oz (3275g)

The Kabosha squash was a request of Morgan to try, as she had tried last year and they peculiarly did not grow at all. This year we had some moderate success. It produced the least amount of fruit compared to the butternuts and acorns, but the novelty of growing them made up for that fact. Since these are larger fruits, they take considerably more energy to produce on the vine which is why there are fewer. The largest Kabosha harvested this season was 4 lb 14 oz (2206g) which was the only full-grown fruit. I’ve read weights can average anywhere from 2-3 lbs up to 8 lbs per squash. The other two fruits were harvested before maturity as the season came to a close.

Morgan makes amazing Kabosha bread that she shares with family and friends, so having homemade Kabosha to source it with enriches the story when she’s serving it. We’ve found that the largest fruit produced about 4 cups of squash which translates to 4 loaves of Kabosha bread. Next season I plan to grow this again with the goal of DOUBLING, yes DOUBLING our yield to the grand large total of TWO count ’em TWO large fruits.

Butternut (Early Remix)

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yield: 47 lbs 12 oz (21651g)

The butternuts were a major hit, winning the Highest Total Weight award with almost 50 pounds of squash from one teeny tiny itty bitty planted seed. As with the other varieties, I had no idea what to expect but was absolutely flabbergasted with the result. In the end we landed 14 fruits with an average weight of roughly 4 1/2 pounds (1545g). There were even a couple more on their way, but they ended up being casualties, ultimately succumbing to the human error of pruning the wrong vines. My bad little guys.

The butternuts are planned to be used as main courses for meals throughout the rest of fall and winter. Since this is our first winter squash harvest, it remains to be seen whether or not too many or too few squash were grown as they are consumed throughout the offseason. It’s all dependent on how much we like cooking squash and what meals incorporating them are deemed worth making.

Acorn (Gill’s Golden Pippin)

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yield: 16 lbs 6 oz (7439g)

The smallest sibling of the kabosha and butternut varieties is the beloved acorn. Just like the butternuts, I am thrilled with the yield of these acorn squash. The plant produces 16 fruits with an average weight of 1 lb 2 oz (496g). This variety of acorn squash provided an extra fun flair with their pumpkin-like color, which is very different than the traditional green varieties grown and seen at the grocery store. The orange color also did help a newbie like me as a visual indicator of ripeness.

As a smaller squash, these have cured and will be stored to use this offseason as side dishes to other meals. I recently followed this recipe for a basic acorn side dish and it was fantastic. The next use for them will be to cook up as a dish for when we host Thanksgiving.

Tomatoes

Tomatoes are absolutely gross and disgusting to consume, amirite? JUST KIDDING. I just wanted to recapture your attention as you traverse the long and arduous textual valley of this blog post. Ok onward.

Tomatoes are of course a staple favorite in the gardening world. It’s no surprise either with how prolific they can be, their capacity for flavor, and the sheer number of different varieties available to experiment with. Of course these are all things you, dear reader, already knew. This was my third year growing tomatoes, but first year expanding the palette to include 4 different varieties at once.

I have to give props to Morgan here for her patience with my nerdy ways. More often than not during peak season we would harvest tomatoes, bring them inside, then Morgan would go to use said tomatoes only to hear me exclaim “NO!!!! You CAN’T DO THAT!!! I haven’t WEIGHED THEM YET!!!” to which she would then delicately lay them aside, casually walk outside, and proceed to scream inside. Like the berries, they required considerable effort to accurately weigh with so many ongoing harvested bowls of fruit. I think we ended up doing a great job.

What I was impressed with the most about the tomatoes was not a result of any individual tomato, but rather how much the plants take over. Now that I’m writing this blog post, I’m starting to notice a pattern of my bitching about overgrowth. Hmm. I suppose this just means plants in general tend to … get out of control. I think the tomatoes won the Most Trellis Collapses award, which I’m not proud to award, but luckily I don’t think the plants and ultimately the yields were affected too much.

Interestingly and according to my logs, even though they all were part of the tomato family, and 3 of the 4 varieties were indeterminate vining varieties, they all seemed to subtly peak at different times.

Indeterminate (Sweetie)

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yield: 3 lbs 4 oz (1486g)

This was the only new indeterminate vining tomato that I experimented with this season. Peaking in early September, the Sweeties were the smallest size of the cherry tomatoes. They were more flavorful than the Chocolate Cherry variety, but less flavorful than the Sun Gold variety. One thing I became more aware of thanks to the Sweeties was how prone different tomatoes are to splitting. The Sweeties had a slightly thicker skin than either the Chocolate Cherry or Sun Gold varieties and were thus less prone to splitting. This was beneficial in the kitchen and more noticeable during the pockets of rain we had throughout the growing season.

Indeterminate (Chocolate Cherry)

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yield: 3 lbs 11 oz (1670g)

This was my 2nd year growing the Chocolate Cherry variety. I was particularly drawn to planting them again due to their unique coloration. They have a darker look with a striped pattern that’s novel when grown along with other mostly solid color varieties. The Chocolate Cherries were definitely late bloomers in relation to the others, peaking in mid-to-late September on average. They were the largest cherry variety, but alas the least flavorful. With so many other tomato options in this world, the bar is high for any tomato to secure its allocation of square footage in the plot. That said, as pretty as they are, this will probably be my last year growing Chocolate Cherries as the flavor isn’t out-of-this-world. They’ve been a great introduction to growing tomatoes for me and were the first tomatoes I ever grew, so for that, I salute you Chocolate Cherry! 🫡

Indeterminate (Sun Gold)

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yield: 5 lbs 10 oz (2545g)

Bringing in the cherry tomato rear is the Sun Golds. If you were to walk through the community garden, you would easily notice that these are by far the most abundant and most popular variety, and for good reason. Crunching the numbers in my logged harvest data, the Sun Golds yielded the most tomatoes by weight, and they did so evenly throughout August into October. They’re also the most flavorful cherry tomato (thus far found) that either Morgan or I have grown. If there was ever a tomato to check the boxes of being a garden staple, it’s the Sun Gold. I will mention however that they are more prone to splitting than the Sweetie variety above, likely because the skin is a bit thinner (and the tomato is slightly larger). That is strictly a hypothesis though. That said, the Sun Golds have won the season for both taste test and total yield. See you next year Sun Golds.

Determinate (Glacier)

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yield: 4 lbs 4 oz (1931g)

Last season I dabbled in growing a couple Roma bush tomatoes, but I didn’t have any other experience growing bush tomato varieties, so I opted to throw one bush variety hat into the ring. Weight-wise, they held their own against the other vining cherry tomato varieties. I went with the Glacier variety as it’s apparently a bit more cold tolerant. Ok let’s be honest, I’m lying. I went with the Glacier variety because it was the most convenient eye-level bush tomato seed packet at the local nursery.

If I had to carve out a use for Glacier tomatoes, I would say sandwiches. They’re a bit tangy and they produce a medium to fairly small tomato as far as bush varieties go and one is a great size to slice up for a sandwich. My tomato agenda includes experimenting with at least one bush variety tomato each season. I plan on replacing Glaciers with something else not because of anything the Glacier did wrong, but rather the plethora of other options. In other words, “it’s not you Glacier, it’s me”.

Beans

Growing beans was one of the most delightful and rewarding crops to grow this season and I definitely will grow them again. End scene. This was one of those crops I had no plans to grow until I did some online seed shopping and was quickly enamored by all the different types of beans and their unique collection of designs. We don’t eat cook a lot of raw beans at home. In fact, I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve done it in my life, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to grow them!

I dedicated my long skinny 2×8 bed to the beans, and similar to the cabbage, I went in with no concepts nor expectations around how they would perform. An interesting observation of the dry beans was that they produce these beautiful pods at their peak, yet they’re meant to be left alone to shrivel up and dry out to ugly brown shells of themselves before any harvesting can take place. Then right about when you can’t handle looking at dead bean stalks any longer, your patience is rewarded when you get to harvest and shell them all to discover their exquisite speckled and marbled bean contents. It really is pretty fun.

Turns out it takes a lot of space to grow a decent amount of dry beans relative to other crops. Not only that, shelling beans by hand can feel like a time-consuming and monotonous process. In total I grew about 1.5 lbs of dry beans. I’m not sure what that leads to in terms of cooked beans, but on paper it doesn’t seem like a lot. I am going to grow them again next year just because they were fun to grow, fun to open, and fun to look at. It’s like sifting through a bunch of shells on the beach. They’re also storage crops (my favorite obviously) so time will tell if they end being fun to eat 👀

Pole Dry (Khabarovsk)

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yield: 0 lbs 4.3 oz (123g)

This was the largest bean variety in the plot and one of the few I could recognize on the vine without opening a pod. The pods were much larger than the others, and the beans were bulging much more than the other varieties. When shelled, the raw bean looks similar in pattern to the O’Driscoll beans below, but because they were much larger they were easy to distinquish and sort.

Pole Dry (Broughton Astley)

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yield: 0 lbs 3.2 oz (91g)

The pods on the Broughton Astley’s were darker than the other pods. What made the beans stand out from the pack was their pinker hue. This was the lowest yielding variety, granted that’s not entirely a fair statement. During the peak of the growing season, the bean trellis fell (twice), uprooting a couple of Broughton Astley bean stalks which ultimately killed the plant. This stopped the plant’s output in its tracks, leaving me with a “what you see is what you get” type of situation. If that didn’t happen, who knows, maybe we could’ve perhaps grown another whole whopping OUNCE! *shakes fists at sky*

Pole Dry (Poletschka)

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yield: 0 lbs 3.8 oz (108g)

This was the most dramatic looking bean variety grown this year. Both the pod and the bean of the Poletschka decided not to succumb to the peer-pressures of being speckley and colorful. Instead they carved their own path of bright greens and sleek blacks. The pod for this bean was not only extremely green, but extremely smooth in contrast to the other pods which were a bit fuzzier and rough. I had no trouble sorting this bean during shelling for obvious reasons. A very cool looking bean especially when compared and complemented with the others.

Pole Dry (Diecimino)

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yield: 0 lbs 4.2 oz (120g)

Diecimino wins the Coolest Pod Design award. In fact, they may just win the Best 63P Decoration of the Year award. The large speckled pink pods really looked like garden ornaments during the peak of their season. This type of pink is not a common color in the produce-growing world, which makes it stand out that much more. I caught myself a few times during a gardening break just moseying over there to take a closer look at the pods. The bean itself reminds me most of a pinto bean, with a longer and skinnier shape and a redder color. I still have no idea if any of these bean varieties will taste different from one another, but if color is any indication then the Diecimino most definitely will.

Pole Dry (O’Driscoll)

_{🟧 = direct-sowed 🟩 = harvested}

yield: 0 lbs 8.4 oz (238g)

Rounding out the dry beans is the O’Driscolls, otherwise known as Poletschka’s smaller friend. The pattern on the beans themselves closely resemble Poletschkas but they are much smaller. Smaller doesn’t detract mightyness though as the O’Driscolls clocked in with a weight over 1/2 lb total yield, the highest of the dry beans. When shelling these, it was fun to see some of the beans go rogue and showcase inverted colors. If you look at the beans above, you’ll notice some solid dark purple ones illustrating what I mean.

Not Weighed

The raspberries were one of the first fruits of the season, and likely the only produce that I wished I weighed. By the time it was decided to record the weights of various things, raspberry season was already coming into full swing.

This year the patch was fairly shaded and overgrown by other large shrubs, but I’ve since pruned and/or removed those after the growing season had ended, so time will tell if that helps their yield. I intend to weigh them next year, especially as they are the 3rd and final valuable perennial berry that we have and will continue to have in our yard.

If there’s one part of the growing season I’d like to delete from my memory, it’s the onions. It never happened. It was all just a bad dream. I never expected onions to make my cry without even cutting them. You know it’s bad when 50 healthy onion starts translates to a harvest scale of ounces instead of pounds.

That said, I’m not giving up on onions in the slightest. Cue Rocky’s theme song. I’ve taken steps to improve the health of the soil which I’m hoping will help, and I plan to experiment a bit on how they’re grown next spring. With my storage crop fascination, onions are still high on the list to understand and grow well.

Homegrown carrots aren’t usually a crop that’s salivated over or daydreamed about, but I planted them mainly due to their reputation of being such a flagship crop in the gardening world. It would be blasphemy not to throw some seeds somewhere. I was actually impressed with the carrot yield this season. I tried growing carrots last year which regressed into growing essentially carrot tops with tiny orange nubs instead. This year, although they were still small, they actual resembled carrots. This is a crop I will probably weigh next year.

For a couple dinners I allocated and roasted the carrots along with a plethora of other vegetables and they almost changed my life. Morgan and I were really impressed with how flavorful they were. So much so that the carrots were our favorite roasted vegetable out of the pan. I’ve never actually enjoyed a carrot or wanted seconds of a carrot until that moment.

The potatoes overall were on the ho-hum scale this season, saved from receiving the Razzie award by the extra pitiful onions above. I don’t think I grew them very well, which is funny because conceptually they need little help nor understanding to grow. Maybe I should take less care of them. One of the big lowlights was that when harvested, they were already starting to sprout which is about the last thing you want to see for a storage crop.

Potatoes will go in my mental bucket of creative experimentation next year along with the onions. Maybe I’ll just throw potatoes on the ground and ignore them the entire year and we’ll be swimming in them come summer. Trialing and Erroring beckons …

Snap beans were one of last year’s delights in my old plot at the community garden. I grew Trionfo Violetta purple snap beans and enjoyed them so much that this year I decided to grow three types instead of one. This of course yielded way too many beans and was entirely overwhelming. They all steadily produced and made another one of my homemade trellises a casualty from weight. If you haven’t noticed, I’m a seasoned veteran in the art of Trellis Collapsation. I won’t be growing this many snap beans again and will in the future focus on one variety at a time.

The upside is I got a bit of an idea on the nuances of different snap beans. Similar to the tomatoes, they all peaked at different times in the season. Gold Nectars were the earliest to fruit, followed by Rattlesnakes and then Trionfo Violetta. The thing about harvesting beans is that they can camouflage very well, making it more difficult to harvest when they are smaller and more tender (and more camoflauged). I will have further thoughts to expand on this nuance in a future year’s end “lessons learned” post, so stay tuned for that.

One of the highlights of the season! The cucumbers were a major hit. I was very impressed by the production of these. One plant allowed me to make probably 20-25 jars of pickles that I was able to share with family and friends and make a few jars to experiment with at home.

This cucumber variety didn’t seem to need much plot space relative to other high-yielding produce, making them that much sweeter to grow. I enjoyed the classic pickling look and shape of this cucumber and will probably grow them again. I got some great reviews and feedback from folks who tried my homemade pickles so I’m prepared to take it to the next level and improve my craft next season. Expect to see these again!

If you asked Morgan one crop we could’ve done with less of, the definitive answer would be summer squash, and I would agree. As a new and curious gardener, it’s difficult to wrangle the clashing forces of wanting to explore fun and new varieties in parallel, and wanting to grow what can realistically be consumed. I’m still in the yearning phase of knowledge gathering, which means experimenting with multiple new varieties is enticing. Unfortunately in this case that meant growing about a million pounds more squash than we could deal with.

Two summer squashes were grown in 63P, and although it was too much squash for us and took up an entire garden bed, I still think it was worth it. Firsthand experience witnessing how much a summer squash yield can be (x2) and observing the different outputs was eye-opening. Goldini 2 was an especially high-yielding local variety. As mentioned previously, I didn’t weigh summer squash because the weight varies with the discretion of the gardener’s point of picking. Squash is a staple and will return next season, perhaps in a more muted sense. I’ve got ideas for new varieties to try, but will save that for a future post.

Lettuces and green were pretty much a lost cause when it came to measuring yield since weight wasn’t and isn’t a useful indicator. Along with their uses in the kitchen for salads and greens for a spoiled rabbit, the varieties planted were very ornamental in the plot, showcasing shades of purples and greens. I grew a few different romaines, and next season will experiment with a wider mixture of greens in general. This year’s romaine was especially rewarding because it was the first crop sowed directly from seeds that I harvested from the romaine I grew last year. A complete lifecycle from seed to plant to seed to plant again!

As far as the herbs went, they were a roller coaster. For instance, cilantro was an experiment gone awry. Cilantro takes a bit of a learning curve so I’ve read, and that was confirmed as soon as I transplanted it and it quickly turned sickly purple and then bolted. The curly-leaf parsley though was a surprising hit. There were no expectations for it, especially watching what happened to the cilantro, but once it took off it was steadily harvestable throughout the entire summer and into fall right up until the beds were put to rest and mulched. Curly-leaf parsley will definitely be grown again (but only weighed in love).

I get to say it in full one last time; the exquisite Charentais Superprécoce Du Roc melons. What a joy. This one plant went from the edges of death and knocking on heaven’s gate to a full and proper life yielding over a dozen delicious melons! If I’m ever asked the question “what tastes horrible at the grocery store but tastes amazing grown at home” my answer every time until proven otherwise will be muskmelons.

Aside from their dramatic French feign of death, these melons weren’t that tricky to grow and were pretty hands off. The trickiest part was determining when to harvest them. They don’t give a lot of visible signs that they are ready to be picked. Instead, their signs are more olfactory in nature. I was unfortunately out of town when they were ready to be picked, so Morgan handled the important task of driving to the plot to sniff around, because once they’re potent they need to be harvested ASAP. Although I did get to partake in some of these lovely fruits when I got back home, Morgan said the best moment was the very first bite of the first perfectly picked melon. I have full confidence taking her word on that and honestly felt a bit jealous. Expect to see these return next season.

Conclusion

What a season! I sometimes mention to people that this blog really serves two purposes; a personal garden journal that allows me to reflect on progressing in the hobby, and as entertainment for a smattering of friends and family. I know I’ve achieved the first purpose, and I hope I’ve achieved the second.

Each day doesn’t seem like much is taking place at the plot or in the yard, but writing this all down reminds me how many irons were actually in the fire this season. Surprisingly, this summary isn’t even all-encompassing as even more was left on the digital sidelines, including snap peas, kumquats, artichokes, rhubarb, garlic and more that were all actively grown and tended to this year. However, the post has to end somewhere!

Now that the growing season is over, it’s time to batten down the hatches, cozy up, and participate in some of the more cerebral aspects of the hobby like studying some gardening books, reflecting on the season’s lessons, planning next year’s goals, and of course more blogging! I’ve got a lot rattling around in my brain for future posts this winter, so stay tuned.

– AA

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