December means time for reflection! The gardening is paused, at least for us, and we have some time to sum up the year. What went good? What went bad? And what to do next year!
My first reflection, before getting in to the actual gardening is that it is quite hard to find the time to make blogposts in the middle of the gardening season. This is not my job, neither is the gardening. I don’t make any money of of this except the savings from all the vegetables and meat we don’t have to buy. I hope one day this will be my full time job because I love sharing and reading about gardening and I really love gardening!
Now, here comes the most exciting part; What went well in the garden this year? Our fridge is full of zucchini, parsley and basil! Zucchini has been so thankful to grow! It keeps the weeds away and doesn’t need any attention. Well except from harvesting ALL THE TIME! Such a blessing! Between our zucchini we planted sunflowers. They were also amazing, so beautiful and I think some birds enjoyed the seeds in the end of summer. Another thing that went well was the potatoes. It’s almost always easy to grow potatoes but sometimes you get vermin or something, but not this year! We have really nice looking potatoes and since we don’t eat so much potatoes I believe we have for the whole year. Tomatoes went fine in the sense that we eat the last ones yesterday, but we have bought canned tomatoes for pasta sauce, pizza and stuff like that. Leek, just like potatoes went well and I think it will last until next years sprouts are ready to harvest. Onions didn’t go so well so we are using leek instead of onions in lots of our food.
Now to the not so fun part, but the very educative part when you get some distance. What went bad… Well, it feels like a lot… We didn’t get any cucumber, the watermelon was eaten by rats, cabbage was a roller-coaster but we actually did get some nice heads at the end (we also had a lot of pests), the sugar peas dried out, the garlic went rotten and the butternut squash didn’t ripen before the first frost. Thinking of everything that went bad I actually came to think about some more things that went well. We got a lot of nice carrots and so, so much breaking beans! Chili was also really good this year! So much more fun to think about the positives!
Anyhow, we learned a lot this year, as we always do! I don’t think I know another hobby where you develop and learn so many new things every year! And as soon as you think you are pro at some vegetables something happens and the harvest fails. The great thing is that I love to learn about this stuff so even though it sucks when you fail I never think about stop gardening. We always get a lot of pests on our cabbage and every summer and fall I tell Aref that: “Next year we are not growing cabbage!”. But every January when I order my seeds I buy some cabbage… Aref sighs at me but I just cant give up on it, and this year we got one or two nice heads! So you can be sure I will order some seeds for next season as well, maybe a lot of seeds, it seems I can be a cabbage-pro, doesn’t it?? 😉
Hopes and dreams for next season will come in the next blog post so stay tuned!
Would be great to hear about your gardening year!
Grounded gardens 