This year we brought in a truckload of cow manure for the garden. I planted heirloom vegetables, and my garden did not produce quite as well as it normally does. The lettuce and spinach were buggy. After spending way to much time washing a couple of bunches, I just pulled the rest and tossed them. They were going to seed anyway.
I grew heirloom tomatoes from seed. The plants got huge and took forever to set fruit. For a while I worried that I wouldn't have any red ones before the end of the season. I did get a few, but Lizzy stole the majority of the red ones and I have even caught her eating the green ones. Since I couldn't keep her out of them, I finally dug most of the plants and tossed them. I used the remaining wire support cages to build a barricade around the last 3 plants. It didn't work, Lizzy is still eating them. So, I didn't bother to cover the tomato plants before the freeze last night.
I planted both bush beans and peas, these plants seemed stunted and yellow. Neither produced nice vegetables.
This year I tried cucumbers, they were bitter, and I only ate a few. Eventually, I dug the plants and threw them away. I decided not to pickle them, since I still have about half the pickles I did left from last summer.
The beets, onions, red potatoes, blue potatoes, zucchini, crookneck squash, delicata squash, butternut squash, lakota squash, and pumpkins all did well. I canned the beets. We haven't bought onions all summer and I still have a large bag of them in my refrigerator.
The blue potatoes and the carrots are still in the ground. I suspect that the carrots are ok, but nothing like the bumper crop we enjoyed last year. We have eaten a few of the blue potatoes. They are good and seem to have produced adequately.
Yesterday, because it was going to freeze, I picked all my squash, zucchini, and pumpkins. The squash and pumpkins have been ripe for a while, but since they haven't fallen off the vines, I was just picking them and using them as needed. They are all stored in the cold storage room along with a bucket full of red potatoes.
I also picked all the remaining red raspberries in the garden. I have picked raspberries a few times in the last 3 weeks or so, and have even made a batch of cooked raspberry jam that I also canned. I have quite a few in my freezer in the hopes that maybe the raspberry plants will survive the cold snap and I will get the rest that I need to make another batch of jam. If not we will enjoy them in smoothies.
The Zestar apple tree produced apples and I bottled some apple jelly, apple butter, and applesauce. (We have 4 apple trees, the Honeycrisp, Gala, and Transparent didn't produce fruit this year.)
We enjoyed a few peaches from both the White and the Elberta peach trees. They are still relatively small, and didn't produce enough to preserve, so I bought a couple of boxes of peaches to freeze and bottle.
Our older Bartlett pear tree produced quite a few pears, We ate a bunch and I bottled a few pints when too many ripened at once to eat. We have two Bartlett pear trees. We also enjoyed the fruit from the Asian pear tree.
We have two plum trees, and between the two got one plum. They are both really young, so I wasn't expecting anything.
We have three cherry trees that didn't produce anything.
The apricot tree stayed alive, but the nectarine tree died. (Both were planted this spring.)
We planted 6 concord grape plants. All but one died. We will try again next year. I bought 2 boxes of Concord grapes and made jelly and juice.
I am looking forward to the rest from gardening that winter provides, but I am sure I will be anxious to get started again in the spring.
