October 7... bwahahahahahahaha!

Last post May 14th... man was I ever optimistic, hu?

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

OK, here's what happened. I got my garden in.
It grew.
I took pictures.
Never had time to post them.
We went out of town two weekends in June.
We went out of town, or had guests, nearly every weekend in July.
We went on 2 vacations in August.
That's when everything started getting ripe.
Then it rained.
Then it rained some more.
My massive, 8 foot high tomato vines, got heavy in the rain and fell over.
The cucumber vines grew to only a foot off the ground, then stopped.
I had one batch of cucumbers that ripened right before our vacations, which meant they rotted in the fridge while we were gone... making them useless for canning.
My zucchini produced two edible veggies.
My bush squash produced one.
My yellow squash produced 3.
I had a billion beets, which I let sit in the ground too long, so I never canned them.

In the end (which was today) I did end up making my goal of having too many tomatoes... unfortunately they all fell over before I really got to enjoy them much. The squash were hopeless, aside from one (count it... ONE) pumpkin which is still alive and just starting to turn orange. Good thing I decided not to can the beets, since most of them were barely the size of my thumb anyway.

So... lessons learned this year.

1) Don't bother starting things from seeds. There is an art to starting veggies from seeds without a proper green house, and I don't have time to learn that art.
2) Reinforce the netting for the tomatoes. The nets themselves worked brilliantly, but the posts need to be buried deeper, reinforced with rocks, and have a wood beam across the top for added support.
3) Don't bother growing what I want to can. The beets were a disappointment, and the one batch of cukes I could have done something with went bad due to scheduling conflicts. I'm better off loading up at a farmer's market when I have the time to schedule canning, instead of doing two or three wee batches over the course of several days.
4) Scale back the tomato plants. I need to spread them out (not growing cukes will help that next year) I've kept the tags for the plants I enjoyed, and at 6, that should be good enough to spread out across my garden plots, leaving Gayle room to grow the carrots she decided she wants.

I've always wanted to grow roses, but haven't bothered with it here because the deer mow them down. Now that the back yard is fenced, however, I'm considering roses next year. I think I'll read up in my gardening book about when to plant them. I'm really... really tempted to bag the idea of veggies and just make the plots a rose garden, ala my Home Town. It's not a bad idea, actually... since Dan wants to put a small patio up there anyway, it would actually be pleasant to have an ornamental garden there.