Gardeners' Holidays: The Changing of the Garden

The wheel of the year has turned round once again, and we find ourselves at the end of the gardening season. Everything left in the garden has been harvested: the last few green tomatoes left on the vines, all the squash, the lima beans. All that's out there now is the Winter Marvel lettuce, which we hope will survive under the winter snow and give us a second crop in the spring.

So, with all the harvest gathered in, it's time to evaluate this year's crops and see just how they did. And I have to say, it's a pretty mixed bag. A few crops produced amazing yields, while others—including some that have been fantastic in the past—were disappointing.

• Arugula: Meh. We planted four squares of it, and we harvested maybe one bunch from each square. I thought this was a disappointing performance from a crop that used to be one of our most prolific producers, but Brian says there was "lots of it" in the bed; we just didn't get a "second bump" out of it like we sometimes do. It all got picked fairly early on, and then it was gone. So maybe we just need to stagger the plantings of it a bit more so we can spread out the harvest.
• Asparagus: Even more meh. Most of the new crowns we planted this spring in the secondary bed (just outside the garden fence, next to the rhubarb) didn't even come up, and the old bed produced maybe one pound total. Next year, we're going to make a point of buying some new crowns while they're fresh, not the last pickings left at the Co-Op, and plant them in both the new bed and the old one on the south side of the house.
• Basil: We planted something like seven squares of sweet basil and harvested only a couple of good-sized bunches. For a crop that produced so much in 2013 that we had to come up with new ways to store it all, this was a definite disappointment. This was the same variety we've always used, so maybe it was just this year's weather that resulted in the poor harvest, but on the other hand, if this year's weather is the new normal, maybe a new variety would do better overall. I figure we'll give it one more year to see how it works out. On the plus side, the Thai basil we tried for the first time this year produced reasonably well and proved very useful, so we'll definitely expand the planting of that next year.
• Cilantro: Virtually useless. We planted one square and got almost nothing out of it. At this point, it's probably not worth even planting it again, since it hasn't done well for the last several years; as Brian puts it, "If it shows up at all, it shows up and dies fast." And I don't even like it that much, so it's no loss to me.
• Cucumbers: Pretty good—about 36 cucumbers off 8 vines, evenly split between the Marketmore and Cross-Country varieties. However, a couple of the Marketmores came out bitter, so we might go with all or mostly Cross-Country next year.
• Dill: Nothing extraordinary, but we got enough to keep us in dill pickles. So there's no need either to increase or decrease our planting next year. 
• Green Beans: This was one of those pleasant surprises. Not only did our old standby, Provider, give us about six pounds of beans, but after it had stopped producing, we got another two pounds and change off a mystery bean plant that somehow got in among the Provider seeds. We've tentatively identified this variety as a Climbing French bean, so we're going to try picking up a packet of those (Fedco doesn't carry them, so it may mean placing a secondary seed order somewhere else) and planting them wherever we can find room. This year, they ended up taking over the trellis just vacated by the snap peas, so maybe we should try to work it the same way next year.
• Leeks: Pathetic. We were a bit late getting them into the ground (around mid-April) and we harvested only four tiny leeks from two squares planted. We'll try to get them in a little earlier next year, and if the crop is equally disappointing, I think it's time to ditch them altogether.
• Lettuce: Not too bad. Our new Bronze Mignonette variety, which replaced the Tom Thumb Bibb lettuce, gave us six good heads from three squares, and our Summer Lettuce Mix another four bunches or so. The Winter Marvel lettuce has only just started to come up, but we're hoping to get some in early spring, and maybe even during the winter. So we'll probably stick with these varieties for now.
• Lima Beans: We only got about ten ounces altogether, once they were shelled and dried. That's not much of a harvest for eight plants, but then, they're not really taking up much space either, since we only planted them on the three trellis squares behind one of the zucchini plants. So we may as well keep going with them, at least until we use up this year's seeds.
• Marigolds: Not for eating, obviously, but we got nice cutting flowers off them all summer long. I honestly can't tell if they help keep pests off the tomatoes or not, but I'm willing to keep them just for decoration.
• Parsley: The seeds we planted never came up, so we ended up buying some from the Rutgers plant sale. But Brian planted one of them in the herb bed in the front yard (mainly so he could say it contained parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme), and it's still looking green and healthy, even though it's technically an annual. So if it survives the winter, we may as well just leave it there and not bother planting any in the garden itself.
• Peppers: Mixed results. Our Carmen frying peppers, which were such promising newcomers last year, hit the ball out of the park this year, producing 33 big, flavorful peppers from just one plant. Our old Jimmy Nardello frying pepper turned in a satisfactory performance with 12 peppers, but it paled by comparison with the Carmen. And our other two varieties were a complete bust: the Klari Baby Cheese pickling peppers gave us only seven tiny peppers, and the Czech Black, a mild sweet pepper, produced nothing at all. So we'll definitely be planting Carmen next year, but we'll almost certainly drop all the others in favor of new varieties.
• Scallions: I don't have good data on these, since we picked them sort of one or two at a time. Brian says we got a "steady one-to-three-months' supply," so I guess there's no need to plant either less or more next year.
• Snap Peas: We got about three pounds total, which isn't too bad. I'd still like it better if we could start harvesting these earlier than the end of May, though. I keep planting them a little earlier every year, but to get any peas in April we'd have to plant them in February, which is probably pushing it too far. Still, this Cascadia variety is the best producer we've had to date, so we'll probably stick with it.
• Squash: We got six squash off our Waltham plants this year, but only two off the Ponca Baby vines. I'm inclined to think we should just go with all Walthams next year if we want to maximize our production. The two varieties taste equally good, so why shortchange ourselves? (Matter of fact, it looks like Fedco doesn't even sell the Ponca Baby seeds anymore. But there's a new variety called "Little Dipper" that allegedly produces "a ton of uniform tan 2-3 lb fruits," and is disease-resistant to boot. So maybe we should give that one a try.)
• Tomatoes: Another disappointment here. The Pineapple variety, which proved so amazingly productive and tasty last year, gave us only one tomato all season. We can't figure out what went wrong. I guess we'll try it again next year in the hope that it was just a fluke of the weather, but we certainly won't count on it for high yield. The Black Prince was also a bit of a flop, yielding only seven medium-ish tomatoes. On the plus side, the Heinz OG produced plentifully, even if the fruits were a bit on the small side, and the Honeydrop cherry tomatoes proved just as prolific—though not quite as tasty—as the Sun Gold, and much less prone to splitting in wet weather. So next year we might go for a mix of Sun Gold and Honeydrop for cherry tomatoes, while keeping the Heinz OG and Pineapple, and maybe trying one new variety to fill in the gaps.
• Zucchini: We kept pretty well on top of our zucchini production this year, so only one squash ended up growing to baseball-bat proportions before we caught it. We got an adequate but not extraordinary yield from our two plants: 13 fingerling zucchini, 2 small, 4 medium, and 2 large. We might have had more if one of the two plants hadn't yielded to borers as usual, but our strategy of burying the stems in dirt managed to keep the other one borer-free, which is a better result than any other technique we've tried. So we'll stick with this method unless we can find anything better.

All in all, a mixed year for the garden. So there's definite room for improvement next year, which we will explore via the Fedco catalogue on our trip out to Indianapolis. Happy holidays to all, and best wishes for a good gardening year in 2019.