By and large, I am pretty happy with my garden this year but here are a few things (for my own remembrance) that I have learned:
1. Plant sugar snap peas instead of regular peas because it takes so so so many shelled peas to give you an amount worth eating.
2. Don't leave town the first week in July -it seems to be prime pea and bean harvesting (or if you do tell your neighbors to reap the fruits of your labors).
3. Commercial tomato cages just don't cut it- for next year I need to contact the Thomas' for making your own tomato cage information. As you can see, I used some unconventional methods to keep my tomato plants from toppling all over everything. (I used twine to tie them to our tv cables on the outside of the house).
4. Stagger the planting of bean rows. Right now we are getting every day more beans than we can eat and before I know it the bean plants will die so it would be better to get them gradually throughout the summer rather than "bam"- way too many all at once.5. Don't cram plants- the seed package spacing guidelines should be followed to a point. I sort of overpacked a few things. (ie cucumbers grow everywhere out of control!)
4 comments:
If you come up with a good tomato cage let me know....my cages always tip over. This year I tried staking them....it's a big mess!
Your garden looks great! We found good tomato cages at Menards. We call them our "Nebraska cages". They are enormous and do the job. I haven't seen them anywhere but Menards. I choked on the price (I think they were $15 each), but they are the only thing that works for us! With the cool spring we've had, I was wishing I had some for my peas. You should have seen the contraption I made to keep my peas up!
Looks good! I love your creative tomato method!
We've learned some of the same lessons (only I didn't do much to keep our tomatoes from toppling, so now its really hard to get into them to pick anything, esp. since we overcrowded them as well). Guess its a learning experience, right? Next year, we'll be building some sort of 6' tower to hold in the plants. And have you seen cucumbers grown up on teepee's? Looks like it works really well--I'll be trying that, too, since ours have spread all over the lawn and are into everything!
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