Our garden is sleeping.
Thank goodness.
I was so ready for the season to hurry up and die.
Right now, we have a couple half-grown oxheart carrots…
and a single frozen kale plant.
Not too high-maintenance.
However, I’m already prepping for next year. Seed catalogs are a really good way to get through winter. Request a beautiful free catalog here from my favorite seed supplier.
So I’ve been informally analyzing my past 2018 season to see what grew and sold best. The result?
My Uncomprehensive Season Analysis
The Devastating Failures
– Kale My mother can grow kale. That kale plant that’s frozen in my garden? That’s the only one that made it to maturity.
– Pike cantaloupes These died. Unexplainably. Ok, well, so I didn’t water them.
– Tomatoes I planted a whole lot of beautiful little seedlings. I don’t know quite what happened, but I didn’t get practically any tomatoes.
– Cabbages I had big plans for beautiful cabbages. Let’s just say they were less than beautiful.
The Respectable Successes
– Tromboncino squash This did quite nicely as a summer squash. People seemed to really enjoy eating it, too!
– Scarlet Nantes carrots As always, I have trouble germinating carrots, but the ones that grew were long and beautiful.
– Liana yard-long beans These were super productive, interesting, and good sellers. I wish they were stringless, though.
– Red Bull peppers Of course I couldn’t ripen these to red. I never can. But they did produce some nice green peppers.
– Outredgerous lettuce This lettuce was so beautiful. It really didn’t have much heat tolerance, but I loved growing it.
– Winter Bloomsdale spinach This had a tough time germinating, but it was delicious and it sold so well!
The Surprising Successes
– Lemon cucumbers These were so productive, bitter-free, and popular.
– Blueberries Our blueberry crop was very respectable, but I was especially surprised at how well they sold. Customers love blueberries!
– Green Onions When I was planting some onions from sets, I started planting them really close on a whim. As they grew, I pulled every other plant and bundled them as spring onions, which sold quite well. It was a nice two-in-one crop.
– Buttercruch lettuce I got some huge heads of buttercrunch that were really beautiful.
– Sweet Genovese basil My biggest surprise! I somehow took a fancy to pampering my basil, and boy, did it pay off. It was really great basil and became one of my most popular sellers.
So here’s what I’m feeling is a common theme of my 2018 experiments: water problems. Hmm… I might be just a little negligent when it comes to irrigation.
So next year, I plan on putting in a nice irrigation system. Think it will help? Let’s see.