Harvest season is almost over. But we’ve had a good yield this year. Next year we plan to build an additional box garden and do a few things differently.
1. We won’t plant watermelon – it just didn’t work. I think one of the reasons was that we used too small of a planter and planted to many…apparently watermelon get big! Who knew!
2. We won’t pour the carrot seeds out of the bag into the garden. Though it makes cool looking carrots, they were WAY too thick and hence a lot smaller than we could have had.
Cool lookin' carrot from our garden
3. We won’t plant the onions as close together either…they didn’t get nearly as big as we wanted, but they were sure yummy!
4. We’ll plant BEETS! I love beets, and found out that Asher does too! He eats them like candy! That’s my boy Ash!
5. We most likely won’t plant 5 zucchini plants! Had we known how big they get and how much each plant yields….holy moly! We’ve got zucchini coming out our ears!
Massive zucchini plants
Since we re-planted them when they started getting bigger, at my in-laws though, my mother-in-law has made several bottles of zucchini strawberry jam (which I tried today and it was REALLY good), and she’s also made some zucchini loaves. Today I also made 5 loaves of zucchini bread – three different varieties! I did just a plain old zucchini loaf, a zucchini chocolate chip loaf (which is extremely tasty!), and 3 zucchini banana chocolate chip loaves. I haven’t tried the latter yet – but if it tastes as good as it sounds, you can bet I’ll be making more of that! (This is a few days later, and I tried the banana/chocolate/zucchini loaf – to be honest it was pretty boring! Won’t be making that again! However, now that I’m addicted to my zucchini chocolate chip loaf, I may just want to plant that many zucchini again next year! Sadly the zucchini is almost gone from the garden now, and I’ll just have to wait till next harvest.)
My zucchini chocolate chip loaf - sadly it's half gone already!
6. We’ll most likely plant more strawberries, and now that we’ve experimented with a few different varieties, we’ll probably use the one we liked the most. But I can’t tell you what kind that is. I hope Justin knows!
7. No lettuce. Though it turned out just fine, we way preferred the spinach. I think we even planted a little too much of that…couldn’t eat it fast enough.
8. We’ll probably try growing some tomatoes. Justin has been talking about it for the last few years – I’m pretty sure next year we’ll take the plunge.
All in all it was a good planting season! We’re still pulling carrots and onions out, but other than that, and using up the zucchini, it’s pretty much done! Now for a long, cold winter…
