Okay, let's hear all your vegetable gardening success stories from last year and what your plans are for this year's crops.
I've started to get the soil in my vegetable gardens turned over and am browsing seed catalogs, making a list of supplies I need to start the seedlings in a couple weeks. Can't wait for the warmer weather to get here.
Am going to give asparagus a try this year. Three of the six Brusselsprout plants from last year have so far survived the long stretches of freezing nights we've had. Am trying to decide whether to prune them back earlier this year to see if I can get a decent yield, or just yank them up and use the space for something more productive. I only got about 12 sprouts from all six plants last year.
I'm going to build some better supports and trellis for the beans, cucumbers and tomatoes. The ants and white moths chewed up within a few days the string trellis I used last year. Bought some metal fencing mesh that I'm going to weave onto some 6 ft stakes and pound them upright into the ground. Will also build a couple planter boxes so I can move the surviving herb plants into them and out of my veggie space.
Think I'm going to skip the corn this year. I could have had a few more rotations of beans in the space they hogged.
We planted two pomegranate saplings from a mail order catalog last year, one of them died almost immediately. The second one I'm hoping has survived the winter and will come back to thrive this year.
The biggest success in the vegetable garden last year were the tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, peppers and watermelon. I'll probably do a repeat of all those this year. The failures were the corn, peas, and blueberries. I think I need to do some serious mending of the soil to make it more acidic for the blueberries. I'm also going to try growing some bok choy this year if I can get them started early enough to beat the heat.
@Butrflynet,
Since peppers and tomatoes and potatoes are all in the Nightshade family, dont plant any one of these in the same spot for more than a year . I sometimes plant tomatoes in the same area for two years but never more than that. Ive been lucky until two years ago when we got hit with an early blight that was brought up from the seed companies that the big box stores usefor stock. Last year I bought all my starter veggies from AMish growers who started their own seeds and ran greenhouse businesses.This year Im also going to start a few special varieties of tomatoes.
Corn is something I dont raise either. We have so many new cultivars of really super sweet corn , and all the AMish grow fresh corn . Its really esy to get fresh picked corn at a farm stand rather than waste my own space.
Im sorta thinking the same thing about gourds.
