The Imperfect Garden - the saga continues

So last year - too late last year - I (along with the help of my son and some friends) started this long time dream of a garden that would grow food for the nearby soup kitchen. 

Well, last year we harvested 'learning opportunities' for this year. But getting a reasonable start this year, we actually grew vegetables - totally organic - from this little mid-city garden!! Cool, eh! Especially for someone, like me, who continues to have little idea of how to do this. To me its all "cow poop, water, sunshine, and magic."

We found all sorts of interesting "Heirloom varieties" (stuff that used to grow here in the U.S., but has been displaced in the grocery stores by a few commercial varieties) and thought it a good idea to work with those. We purchased a bunch of seeds (my son could tell you what, to me they were "seeds") over the winter and stated planning the beds we'd built during the summer.

We started planting in late April (as I recall). I learned about watering (more, Colorado is really dry) and weeding (it could be a fulltime job, or just let nature take care of most of it. Guess which one I chose). Here is what the garden looked like.

Long story short, 5 zuchinni plants produce a LOT of zuchinni! The soup kitchen got the vast majority, but I kept some to give away and eat, and freeze, and make zuchinni bread, and ... OK, all the stories you've heard about zuchinni - all true. Wow, it was overwhelming!


But the greater surprise for me was the various types of yellow squash. Those things produced about twice the output of the zuchinni plants! Then we had too much basil, too many Anaheim peppers (from just one plant!), and more oregano than I know what to do with (also from one plant). Here's what a typical day's harvest looked like.

 

That's a round zuchinni on the right - yummy! See what I mean about the yellow squash? Its called "Prolific Yellow Squash" and certainly lived up to it's name. Here is how it looks on the vine.

This was a typical morning's harvest during the summer! Occasionally, a few tomatoes and bell peppers. The deer and squirrels got all the corn just before it was ready to harvest. Another "learning experience". And the broccoli was first infested with Mountain Flea Beetles, then got a bad case of aphids - another "learning experience". Surprisingly, we still got a few heads of broccoli from them.

Then, there was also a Boston Marrow squash. This one was harvested too early (like I said, I don't know what I'm doing), but after sitting on the table for a month, Q made a wonderful curry from it.

That's a 12" iron skillet its sitting in. There is another one growing out there that is about twice the size of this one. Anyone know when you harvest these things? Is there a guideline somewhere?

All this, plus giving the Marian House soup kitchen a huge amount of food - mostly squash. It feels like a productive garden, and I am starting to feel like a gardener! Way cool!

Right now Ray, my wonderful neighbor, is out there digging up some of the finished beds and re-sculpting the garden for next year. We'll try to incorporate the lessons learned from this year and do even better next year.

Wish us luck!!