With the previous garden analysis posts, I wasn’t able to include a lot of photos that I would like to have. Due to media storage running out in my WordPress account (I’m at 98% now, so I have to go find some more photo/critter of the day posts to delete!), I did a lot more videos, instead.

Turns out, I did quite a lot of them.

So this post is going to have all those videos, starting with the longer garden tour videos.

But first, I want to mull over my final thoughts on this past year’s garden, before I do a final review and reset post for next year’s garden.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to think about how the garden went this year.

I’m unhappy with the fact that the garden was so much smaller, and that we didn’t get the trellis beds built, that we wanted to. Even if we didn’t get the trellises added until later, we should have at least been able to build the raised beds. It seems that every time we had a day where we should have been able to get in to fell the dead spruces to use for it, something would come up that needed to be done right away, like helping my mother with errands, or doing our own errands in the city, etc. Then there were all the days when it simply wasn’t safe to try and fell trees due to weather. Mostly high winds. Felling 60′ + tall trees against the wind is just not a thing to to! It got me very frustrated. Still, I’m glad we managed to fell the trees we did, and the more that are taken down, the more space there will be to fell the bigger ones that we need to make sure fall away from the house.

The price of lumber is still quite high, which is why we’re scavenging our dead trees. Though prices have been slowly dropping again, they’re still high enough that I’ve even had people offer to cut down the dead trees for me, in exchange for the lumber. In another world, I would have happily taken them up on this exchange, but we need the lumber for ourselves!

The other frustration is not knowing why some things, like the beets, did not do well at all.

Oh! I completely forgot to include the radishes in the root vegetables post! They were planted as a fall crop, and while a couple grew fast enough to start blooming, and they certainly did better than the beets did, by a long shot, their roots still did not do well. Plus, my one daughter that actually likes radishes happened to be away and house sitting at the time when they would have been best for harvesting, so even what little we had never really got used.

Discovering that the roots from those trees my mother allowed to grow where she’d had a row of raspberry bushes, many years ago, were actually getting into the grow bags and crowding out the things I actually wanted to grow was another frustration. When she asked us to move here, and I mentioned wanting to clear those trees away, she demanded they stay. They’re a wind break, she says. Well, sort of, but even as a wind break, they’re not located in a good place. When I was starting to clean up around them, I discovered a number of stumps that showed these trees had been cut down in the past, most likely by my late brother. Much of what we’ve got now are actually suckers that grew out of the stumps.

Those trees have got to go, and go permanently, if we want to be able to use that space to grow food.

Still, they do provide a small amount of shelter, so that will likely wait until we’ve been able to plant more shelter belt tress in better locations. We just have to be very careful about where, since we need to avoid a buried telephone line.

We might just cut down the Chinese elms, though, as their seeds were also a contributing problem. The maples that are in there are not so bad. They have different root systems, too.

All in good time, but where they are used to be part of the main garden, and that’s space I’d like to reclaim at some point. I just didn’t realize, until this year, the extent of the problems those trees are causing.

Then there was the stuff planted in the new chimney block beds against the chain link fence. The bed we had there previously didn’t have anything to hold the soil in place, and we were losing it under the fence, so we had to do something. These are the last of the chimney blocks that were intended to replace the chimney for the old wood furnace – back when my parents bought the property in 1964! A chimney that was taken down when we got the new roof last fall, as only the electric furnace is being used.

We’ve used those chimney blocks as planters in the old kitchen garden retaining wall, so I expected them to work find. Yet nothing planted in them thrived at all. I can make some guesses, but I can’t say for sure why they failed.

There was some frustration with deer damage to the peas, bush beans, strawberries and asparagus, but nowhere near as bad as the year we had so many groundhogs move into the yard, so that’s a relative thing.

We did have some good harvests, especially with the pink banana and candy roast squash, the carrots and – eventually – the tomatoes. Even the tomatoes that had to be harvested early because they got blight, which is a first. We’ve never had tomato blight before and, as far as I can remember, my mother never did, either.

Though I have to say, it’s been great to grow potatoes and not have any Colorado Potato Beetles! We had massive problems with those in my mother’s garden when I was a kid! We also grew massive amounts of potatoes to last 7 people all winter, but there until we started growing them again, I don’t think anyone has grown potatoes here for many years.

So I am happy with quite a few things, but disappointed or frustrated with quite a few other things. A real mixed bag!

You will be able to see how that progressed over our year in these garden tour videos. This first one is the spring tour I included in another post.

I was able to do monthly garden tour videos, starting in June.

In this July tour, you can see the self seeded red poppies that showed up in the shallot bed, that turned out to be this variety – and I have no idea where they came from originally!

In this August tour, you can see just how poorly the plants did in the chimney block planters – and how well the compost pile squash did!

This September tour was done on what was our average first frost date.

We even got one last tour in October! We’d had our first frosts by then.

Also, I completely forgot that the cat we now call Syndol had been named Rudy!

Amazingly, we still had crops in the ground to harvest in October. The frosts we got came quite a bit later than usual, and the temperatures remained mild, so we could get away with quite a bit being left out longer!

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These next videos are more topical, starting with one I included in an earlier post, about preparing beds and making carrot seed tape.

This next one was done in early April, when we got a snow storm. I was able to pot up tomatoes that day!

You can also see some of the early sprouts, many of which did not survive to be transplanted.

This next one is a time lapse video of planting the carrots, and preparing the spinach bed.

Gooby, the yard cat you see often in the video, has since disappeared. 😥

In this next video, we planted the Alternative Lawn Mix, spinach in the bed prepared above, and the bed preparation and planting of the Hungarian Blue poppies.

Sadly, Marlee, the cat in the thumbnail, did get outside and disappeared. She was unhappy that we’d brought the tiny kittens and their mother in, and when a window screen got knocked open, out she went and we never saw her again.

I miss her!

This next video took 5 years to make, and shows the progression of the old kitchen garden from completely overgrown in 2018, to our 2023 garden.

This progress video includes time lapse video of building the last two raised beds.

The next video is another time lapse video, and one I posted previously, showing where we reworked the tulip bed and planted our new apple tree – and protected the area from deer!

That was another area that had been very overgrown when we first moved here.

This next short video is of planting our Purple Peruvian potatoes in grow bags, with comparisons to the first year we’d grown them.

This next one was done in late May, when we transplanted our gourds and some squash, before our average last frost date.

It’s a shame that such healthy looking transplants did so poorly!

Here is another time lapse video, also done in late May, planting the Tom Thumb popcorn, plus the free Hedou Tiny Bok Choy and Jabousek lettuce seeds we tried.

This next one is very different. It shows what was discovered as I tried to repair a hose from the house to a tap in the garden, including more time lapse video.

The damage turned out to be far more extensive – no surprise, given the pipes were likely older than me!

Since this video was taken, I’ve dug up half the pipe, from where I’d first tried to repair it, to the tap. I asked my brother about the mystery sections of pipe the narrower pipe was running through. He said those were put there to help protect the narrower pipe. Which seems and odd way to do it, to me!

Now that we know the whole thing needs to be replaced, the plan is to dig a trench and remove the remains of the old pipe, then lay down some PVC pipe, with drainage holes, to protect a contractor’s grade garden hose that has been gifted to us already. At the garden end, we’ll have the tap and a sink set up – I’ve found what I want to use in one of the sheds – as a vegetable washing station. We will also be building a garden shed nearby, to replace the current one that’s rotting and starting to fall apart.

Lots of work to be done!

Finally, one last short video, showing our first major harvest!

For all the struggles we had this year, I think I can say we had a pretty decent gardening year overall. Especially compared to our Terrible Now Good Growing Year, last year. 😂

I hope you enjoy these!

The Re-Farmer