Now that we’re around the mid-point of our growing season, I thought it would be a great time to share our updates. This includes good harvests and bad crops and what we’re already planning from learned experiences this year.
What Went Good So Far This Year?
The Greenhouse Crops
Our greenhouse has provided and continues to provide a bountiful harvest month after month this year. This is our 3rd summer with the greenhouse so we’ve learned a thing or two.
One of the best things we’ve done includes a watering schedule. Every Wednesday and Saturday while the babies nap we water the greenhouse. Since we can’t rely on rain to water the greenhouse, regular scheduled watering is a must.
Additionally, we noticed that there were no cabbage moths in the greenhouse eating our kale this year. We believe this is related to us covering the brassicas with a hoop house so less cabbage moths were here and therefore less entered the greenhouse. Because of this we’ve had a HUGE abundance of kale. At least $30 worth so far, and we just keep harvesting!
We’ve also had a prolific cherry tomato harvest now that we’ve realized it’s a indeterminate variety. We had a fantastic spring carrot crop and lettuce crop. A decent beet harvest and a great radish crop. We’ve really learned a lot from the past few years greenhouse growing and we’ve pretty much mastered our current greenhouse crops!
We just planted more beets and carrots for a fall crop in the greenhouse, so fingers crossed it provides more to harvest!
Herbs, Herbs and More Herbs!
The amount of dried herbs we’ve harvested thus far is truly astounding! Our greenhouse dill grew beautiful thick stems with lots of dill leaves. We easily dried well over $60 worth of dill this year – and there’s still more in the garden we’ll use for pickling.
Sage, oregano and rosemary too have been bountiful. It’s been a great herb season thus far and there’s lots more to come.
Raspberries
We have a 3 year old raspberry plant this year that provided a few pints worth of red delicious berries. Additionally, our property is covered in wild red and black raspberry plants that we’ve been slowly pruning and shaping to grow bigger and more prolific each year. The amount of money we’ve saved on toddler snacks because of our raspberry harvests has been amazing.
Onions, Peppers, Tomatoes, Sunflowers, Garlic and Cantaloupe
These plants have been growing especially well. 2024 has given us our best onion and garlic harvest to date. We easily got 5 quarts of onions. While they didn’t grow too big due to excessive winds knocking them over in early summer, it’s still more than we’ve ever grown!
We also successfully grew garlic this year! Garlic is easy to grow, but learning when to plant it in autumn was where we fell flat last year. Now, we know to plant around Halloween, so we will always have a great crop moving forward!
Our tomatoes were strategically designed to be an amazing harvest this year – but we had a few small setbacks. The big setback was due to a deer and her fawn eating our plants in June/early July. But they thankfully appeared to have left the property, so the tomatoes grown back. Another slight setback we’ve encountered this year is the material we used to trellis the tomatoes. We used twine instead of a durable string, and the twine is starting to disintegrate. Lesson learned! All that said, we should still get a fairly good harvest!
The sunflowers didn’t go quite as planned, but they still turned out beautiful. All the animals that ate our sunflower seeds last year left a lot in our raised beds. The plan this year was to build a new sunflower bed, but we didn’t get around to finishing it to the full-size. So we have little crops throughout the raised beds.
Lastly, the other surprising crop this year is cantaloupe. Last year (2023), due to a very late frost we lost our original plants, and by the time the summer ended we only had one ripe cantaloupe from the new plants. It was delicious. This year we already ate one ripe fruit and have about 5 others growing right now.
Things That Aren’t Doing So Well…
Thankfully this list is quite short.
Pumpkins & Butternut Squash
My favourite crops – pumpkin and butternut squash. We do have two pumpkins so far, but I wanted a lot to puree and roast seeds. There’s still time, but usually we have more than this by this time of year. The mound we grew it on was overrun by grass and so the pumpkins were competing and was probably one of the bigger problems. They also needed fertilizer which we didn’t give them. Lesson learned – we cut back the grass and fertilized.
The butternut squash are growing VERY slowly. Again, the issue of fertilizer, mulch and water are the root of our problem.
Cucumbers & Watermelon
Sigh. Our cucumbers started off great, however, they ALL got a type of fungus and it’s killed off almost all of the plants. We were really hoping for another awesome harvest with lots of cucumbers to pickle, but it doesn’t look like that will be the case this year. We have gotten a few to eat so far which is nice. Hopefully it bounces back and they make a liar out of me.
Sadly our watermelon seeds never germinated. That makes 2/3 years not even germinating. This probably has something to do with our climate. Last year was a very dry and hot summer and we only successfully grew one large watermelon. Whereas this year it’s wet and VERY humid.
Brassicas
2024 will be our last season growing broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage. This year we decided to prevent cabbage moths by building a hoop house overtop to protect them as each and every year we suffer significant causalities in this area. The hoop house kept out 80% of the bugs, but they still got in. By the time the broccoli was ready to harvest it would bolt due to the excessive humidity we’ve been having this year. The cabbages were just destroyed by slugs, earwigs and the few moths that made it in. These crops just aren’t worth our time and space anymore. They’re difficult to protect, they take up an entire 12′ x 4′ bed and they don’t produce very much.
Those That Are Just Coasting By…
Our brussel sprouts are doing ok, not as big as I would like, but not dying either. We’ll see what we get at the end of the season.
I’ve had a hell of a time trying to keep the strawberries from getting eaten and honestly, we’re only harvesting maybe 40% of what’s grown. The other 60% is going to the nature tax this year. The young pear trees were eaten by the deer so they’ve just regrown their leaves and are trying to establish this season. Lastly our blueberry plants did provide us with a whole 4 blueberries this season, but again, the other 10 or so blueberries were taken by the nature tax.
Potatoes of all kinds! Our white potatoes are being grown in bags this summer and they’re doing pretty well considering we’ve not maintained them. If we stayed on-top of the crop we’d probably have a bigger yield per bag. However, we only have about 5-8 potatoes per bag. We’ve already replanted them a few times too so we are getting a decent recurring crop.
The sweet potatoes are looking VERY promising. However it’s only August so we won’t know for sure yet, hence them being itemized in this category.
What We’ve Learned & Plans to Make It Better
Overall the garden is doing pretty well! We’ve learned some lessons on what to improve on with the tomatoes for next year. We’ve decided not to grow some plants next year. We’re going to focus on what we do well and stop trying to do everything.
We’re looking forward to our end of the year garden update to really decide what went well.
Conclusion:
This concludes this entry into our gardening this week series. We hope you enjoyed it and we hope you will subscribe and follow along with us on our journey. Also, be sure to check out our other blog entries where we have growing guides, seed saving guides, and recipes. If you have any questions or comments please leave them below.
