Final Garden Post for 2015

Overall the garden was very successful this year. In the last month I've harvested the sweet potatoes and cured them for 10 days at 80 degree temperatures in the girls' playroom, as well as planted the cover crop for the rest of the garden, a winter rye and hairy vetch mix.

Two wheelbarrows full from two rows with 12 plants in each

How the garden looked after being cleaned out. The green is hulless oats planted where the white potatoes were.

Sweet potatoes laid out for curing. Some were huge!

Winter rye and hairy vetch, the cover crop

Recently I started using the seminole pumpkins. They are tan on the outside and sort of bell shaped, not the most exciting to look at BUT they are supposed to store for up to a year at room temperature. They also did well in the garden.

Rather boring tan-colored outside ...

... beautiful vibrant orange on the inside

After a warm week, the cover crop is starting to come in despite being planted rather late in the season. Charles and the girls raked leaves in the yard, and we're spreading them in the walkways of the garden.

See the itty bitty rye beginning to grow?

As always, we had some successes and some things that could have been better. Here's the final run down.

Success:
- Seminole pumpkins did well. They were resistant to squash bugs and continued to grow and flower into the fall. Harvested one dozen ripe pumpkins and another dozen that are nearly ripe.
- Summer squash were prolific. I got sick of squash.
- Butternut squash and acorn squash did well.
- Popcorn did well and yielded around 100 ears.
- Tomato did well, though still struggled to fight off blight.
- Cucumbers were successful. I got sick of them too.
- Sweet potatoes grew and grew and yielded quite a harvest. Should plant only half as many next year.
- We finally had success with watermelon this year and grew several varieties that were quite delicious. I think our favorite was the strawberry watermelon, but the ali baba was good too even though it didn't produce as well.
- Peppers did well also. I gave away the final batch because I didn't have time or ideas of what to do with them.

Less than success:
- Sugar pumpkins died early, and then I replanted them. We ended up with a couple that didn't quite have time to mature.
- Spaghetti squash and delicata were more prone to pests and disease.
- Sweet corn was a colossal failure. Next year we'll focus solely on popcorn in our garden and buy sweet corn locally.
- Green beans were a pain to pick and got hit with bean beetles. No need to plant them again.
- Sugar snap peas never really came up. We planted too late and then they got drowned with a bunch of rain.
- Berries had only marginal yields. We picked only a couple of blueberries and a few handfuls of raspberries. I tried covering them with nets, which got tangled in the mower and also caused the death of one bird. The nets are probably not worth it for next year.