Garden Review

It's the time of the year that we're wrapping up the bulk of our gardening activities for the season.  When the frost threatened in mid-October, we picked all the remaining tender veggies, protected the hardy greens, and started putting the garden to sleep.  The fall greens will continue to trickle in, but the majority of the harvesting is done until spring.  And now that we've had a few weeks to let the fervor of vegetable processing subside, we wanted to take a look back and see how we did!

First, what did the garden look like?  This was our general setup: 15 beds at 3' x 9', or about 400 square feet of growing space.  However, we harvested basically nothing out of six of those beds due to poor germination, inconsistent irrigation, or marauding varmints.  So, we were actually working with more like 250 square feet.

Second, what did we grow?  Mainly tomatoes, squashes, potatoes, and onions, it turns out.  We totaled a little over 150 lbs total.  Back in January, we had set an arbitrary goal of harvesting 100 lbs of food from the yard, so blowing past that mark by more than 50% was satisfying.  It might not sound like much when some of our electronic friends are growing more than 225 lbs of butternut squash alone, but hey, we gotta start somewhere!

Third, how did it compare to our meal plan?  Most things were quite a bit less, but the summer squash and zucchini exceeded our plan by a lot.  We didn't have any delusions of being able to grow all our vegetables in 250 (or even 400) square feet of growing space, but we hit about 20% of our total annual vegetable demand (or about 50% during the harvest season).  That is, over the summer, we were bringing in about 7 lbs/wk of produce from the local farmers market, and harvesting about 7 lbs/wk from the garden, which was about as much as we could keep up with.  Those 14 lbs/wk through the whole year work out to 728 lbs of veggies.  For what it's worth, our meal plan called for about 675 lbs of vegetables over the course of the year (not counting garlic powder, onion powder, or herbs, if we wanted to make those, too), so not too far off.  Is it just us, or does the fact that our theory and our experiment line up so well make you really excited too?  ...Just us?  Ok, nevermind.

We'll just finish up then with a few pictures to show you how the end-of-growing season frenzy played out here.  This is the 25 lbs of veggies we brought in right before the frost.  It's about 80% green tomatoes.

These are the volunteer potatoes we dug a few days later.  The volunteers made up about 60% of our potato harvest, probably because they got to start growing right away in the spring while the rest of the garden was still too wet to dig and plant until early June.

Part of putting the garden to bed is pulling out the delicious weeds, like these dandelions.  But wait!, you say?  You're harvesting and eating the quintessential spring green that supposedly turns irreparably bitter after blooming, in October?  Why yes, dear readers!  Soaking the greens (and roots!) in cold water removes most of the bitterness any time of year.  It's great!

All the damaged volunteer potatoes ended up in this casserole, along with some freshly smoked bacon, some of the damaged tomatoes, green beans, some onions and garlic, and a creamy plain yogurt sauce.  It doesn't look terribly colorful from this angle, but the flavor was great!

The sweet potatoes, nearly all of which were damaged on harvest, ended up in this quiche, along with more tomatoes, onions, garlic, and plenty of herbs.  Yum!

We had made buffalo-seasoned cauliflower before, but then we got the idea to try it with other veggies, too.  The eggplant, with its spongy, sauce-saturated texture, was the best, but the summer squash and zucchini weren't bad, either.

We made multiple types of pizza; these two had a buffalo-type sauce, except with spicy salsa instead of Frank's hot sauce.  Our recipe needs some tweaking yet, but the concept is good, and the pizza was delicious!

How is your gardening season wrapping up?