2016 Garden Totals

Some of our garden-produce soup

Ok, I'm a little slow this year, but here it is at last.

It probably doesn't help my motivation to post that our garden totals went down for every category except potatoes, cheery tomatoes, garlic, and beans.

In pounds:

Strawberries: 4.2
carrots: 3.74
peas: .09
beans 9.45
potatoes: 32.8
cucumbers: 0
tomatoes: 74.4
cherry tomatoes 11.5
garlic: 1.82
volunteer pumpkin 1.54
lettuce, chives, oregano, thyme: didn't keep track, but had plenty except for lettuce

What we learned:

Potatoes get weird if you harvest them after a hard freeze (like we did, in December!) however, if you fry them up in hash they are edible.  (They are not as edible in mashed potatoes or potato jackets.)

Carrots harvested after a hard freeze taste fine in stir fry.

We're going to try to plant a second batch of beans for a bigger harvest this year.

The peas need to either get started inside or planted outside sooner.

Do NOT put a shovel-full of dried manure in the hole that you dig to plant tomatoes!  If you do this, you get pretty leaves and not as many tomatoes.  Mom planted her in a dirt that was ALL manure-turned-soil and she got one tomatoes out of the six plants we gave her.

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I had kicked around the idea of resting our garden this upcoming year and planting nothing at all.  I'm going to be working full time all summer and won't have time to tend it closely.  But A) we learn something every year and B) home-grown food is much more flavorful and C) we eat more veggies when we grow veggies.