Garden 2013 is pretty much done!

This year Joe built me another garden box and I filled all three of my boxes to the brim.  This weekend, I went out back and found some pretty moldy plants which was what I expected after the downpour of rain we had.  It was uncharacteristic to have that much rain this year in the fall and it pretty much ended my green beans and zucchini plants. So, I decided to pull everything up (except the two tomato plants) and get the beds cleaned up for the winter.  I thought I would spend a bit of time thinking about what worked and what didn't.

I dug up the onions, sliced them up and put the in the freezer to use for cooking.  They didn't really get as big as I had hoped, but I got those in really late.  I will probably plant those again, and probably more than I did this year as I use a lot of onion in my cooking.  My two cucumber plants produced a total of three cucumbers. I doubt I will be planting those again.  They took up a lot of room in the box, required a LOT of water and I didn't get much in return.  I ended up buying cucumbers at the farmer's market to make pickles for a really good deal so will do that again next year.

Oh my zucchini!  I had zucchini coming out of my ears this summer. I have a ton in the freezer and gave a lot away.  It was great to do that and I will love the zucchini bread that we make this winter but the plants pretty much took over the carrots.  I will probably only plant one zucchini plant next year and I would guess that will be plenty.  The carrots though?  This is year two where I didn't really get anything to show for them, so I won't be doing that again!

My tomato plants are still going strong and I imagine they will be for awhile!  Joe has been loving the cherry tomatoes and there are still a great number of big tomatoes on the other plant.  Another success for sure has been the pumpkins.  We got three pumpkins and we had so much fun watching them grow.  I think I will plant them on the top of our retaining wall next year so that they have more room to spread.  I was doing a lot of redirecting!

We didn't get a lot of berries off of our blueberries or raspberries but we didn't really expect to since they need a few years to grow!

My lettuce/spinach experiment didn't really work but we got some great lettuce from the farmer's market this year so I don't know that I will try that again next year.  My green beans had a rough time this year too.  I think next year I am going to try to do the pole beans instead of the bush beans.  I think they will do a little better in that space!

Here are the last pictures from the garden!

Garden 2013 is in the bag (except for the tomatoes) and while we didn't get a great turnout for some of it, it was a lot of fun!  Until next year....