For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.
Some things managed to work out pretty well, even with our rough start in the garden!
The Original Plan
Corn
Corn is something we’ve tried to grow a few times. The first year, we grew several varieties with some being grown more as part of our long term plan to break up soil that had never been gardened before, and prepare the area for a future food forest. I’ve also been trying to grow kulli corn – a deep purple Peruvian variety – for a number of reasons, though we’ve found ourselves growing Montana Morado, instead. Some worked well, some didn’t.
With our garden size actually being reduced after a flood year, instead of expanding, this year we weren’t necessarily going to grow corn at all. We just didn’t have the space prepared for such a nitrogen hungry plant.
However, I had a couple of short season sweet corn varieties I wanted to try somewhere, so when I found myself with larger spaces between winter squash transplants in the second bed, I chose Yukon Chief, which had the shorter growing season: a mere 55 days!
Peppers
We have been trying different varieties of peppers to find the ones the family likes most. Personally, I can’t eat peppers, so I have to rely on their feedback for this. Last year, we had a mix of success and fail with peppers. This year, my older daughter requested one type of hot pepper, and we figured we should probably cut back on the number of varieties to try out this year. So far, no one has really found enough difference between the varieties of sweet peppers to really choose any one type over the other.
Eggplant
We’ve tried two varieties of eggplant before. The first we tried was Little Finger, which was grown in grow bags. They didn’t thrive, but we did have a few little ones we could harvest that we did enjoy. We later learned that nearby elm trees had roots invading the grow bags – a whole row of them all along the north end of the garden, near the self seeded elm and maple trees my mother allowed to grow after she transplanted the raspberries they’d started growing through.
We tried them again another year, but they fared even worse, growing in one of the concrete chimney block planters by the chain link fence. It wasn’t until this spring that I found the blocks were completely choked out by elm tree roots.
So this year, I wanted to try them again, in a completely different area!
The Classic eggplant was new to use last year. Only one seedling started indoors survived. It went into the wattle weave bed and the plant grew strong and healthy, though it was late in producing. In the end, we had one roughly palm sized eggplant to try, plus a couple smaller ones.
I wanted to try both again, this year. I was rather liking the idea of being able to grow enough eggplant to make baba ganoush, or cook nice big slices of them over an open fire.
How it went
Corn
I was really, really happy with this variety! Having something that matured so quickly was amazing!
Sure, I probably planted them too close together, but that didn’t seem to bother them too much.
They do not grow very large cobs, but the corn was so tasty, I could eat them raw!
There were two problems, though.
One was, high winds. After they got mostly flattened after a day of high winds, I did what I could to straighten them and support them, only for them to get flattened again from another direction.
The other was, racoons. I’d actually harvested all the corn – or thought I did – when I found I’d missed a few cobs. I decided to leave them to dry on the cob, so harvest seed at the end of the year. That never happened, because the racoons tore them apart and ate them.
*sigh*
Peppers
Wow, did we get peppers!
The hot peppers – Cheyenne – were started much earlier indoors. For the sweet peppers, I still had seeds for a collection of early varieties, plus a variety that did very well last year, and even a few seeds left from one I’d tried to grow a previous year.
I ended up planting a few of each, thinking the older seeds would have a lower germination rate.
Which was sort of true.
We ended up with quite a lot of the hot peppers. They went into a raised bed in the East yard, in between the two varieties of eggplant.
The sweet peppers all went into the high raised bed, later to be interplanted with shallots.
They all did really well! Especially the ones in the high raised bed. They got so full of peppers that got so big and heavy, I found myself having to add supports to some of them – and others actually broke their stems from the weight!
What they didn’t do was ripen much.
As with everything else this year, they were well behind. I did have some I could harvest, with the purple Dragonfly and Purple Beauty peppers ripening fastest, then some Sweet Chocolate but I ended up harvesting a whole lot of unripe peppers before they could be killed off by frost.
The good thing about peppers is, they keep ripening after they’ve been harvested.
I did end up with enough peppers ripening indoors that some could be cut up and frozen, while others got dehydrated. The family actually got tired of eating peppers, like they did with tomatoes!
The exception being the hot peppers.
My oldest daughter is the only one that can eat them, and even then, just small amounts. These aren’t even an exceptionally hot variety of pepper, either!
We did try dehydrating a bunch. We don’t have a dehydrator, and use the oven for that. Unfortunately, the peppers made it so that we could barely stay in the kitchen while they were dehydrating, because breathing the fumes caused our lungs to start burning!
Once they were dry, though, they went into a jar. They should be processed into a powder, but no one wants to do it and accidentally end up breaking powdered hot pepper.
There was a LOT of green hot peppers, though, and they ripened very well indoors.
What I ended up doing was stringing them, and they are now hanging in the cat free zone (the living room) above where the heat vent is, to dry. It’s a lot slower, but it doesn’t create fumes.
Eggplant
We ended up with quite a few surviving transplants this year, which was really nice. They went into a low raised bed with the hot peppers. For this bed, I covered it with cardboard and thick paper as a mulch, then cut openings to transplant through. I moved the box frame cover onto it, and set up sheets of plastic around it to create a sort of open greenhouse situation, since the eggplants and peppers are all heat loving plants.
The plastic ended up being torn off by high winds.
Later in the season, I was able to try again, using stronger plastic and running paracord both inside and outside the plastic to keep it in place, which you can see in the last photo in the slideshow below.
The plants themselves stagnated in growth for a while, until things dried up enough that I could mow some lawn. Once they got a nice grass clipping mulch on top of the cardboard and paper, they really started to grow and bloom.
Eggplants have such lovely flowers.
We were able to harvest some small eggplant towards the end of the season, before they all got harvested ahead of a killing frost.
The setbacks means they never got particularly big, but they were big enough to get a taste of them!
My conclusion, and thoughts for next year.
For the corn, I most definitely want to grow them again. While I am happy with the Yukon Chief, I want to try the other variety, next year. I can’t remember the name of it right now, but it matures in 65 days, I believe. Wherever we end up planting them, I want to make sure to have something set up to support the plants so they don’t get knocked over by high winds as they get bigger. I have a few ideas that would involve fence wire or something like that, set up horizontally, for the stalks to grow through.
I also want to find more kulli corn seeds to try again, but maybe not next year. We shall see. I might buy some seeds (if they’re not sold out again), just in case we end up with enough garden real estate available. If it doesn’t happen, though, I’m hoping the few Montana Morado seeds that got included in the mix along the chain link fence will survive the winter and grow. For the number of seeds in there, if they do survive, I expect to have to hand pollinate them. Then I will leave them on their stalks to dry, and save more seed for next year.
We’re still trying out different varieties of sweet corn. Once we figure out what we like that grows well here, we will want to dedicate a larger area of garden space to be able to grow enough that we can can or freeze some. For now, my single packet of I think only 50 seeds will be enough.
As long as we can keep the racoons out of them!
For the peppers, we won’t need to grow hot peppers again for a very long time! I don’t think we want to grow so many sweet peppers again, either. I’m debating, for next year, picking up a variety that grows smaller “snack size” peppers, instead, but I haven’t decided yet.
As for the eggplant, I’m happy with how they did, under the circumstances. I do want to grow them again. I probably won’t grow them next year, though. I want to save the garden real estate for staples, instead.
Given what a rough start we had this spring, all of these did way better than expected, so I am very happy.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 