Vegetables Being Harvested Now

It is now winter and the vegetable garden is bare.  2011 was kind of an odd year weather-wise.  We had a long and cold spring.  The leaves on the trees were a couple of weeks later than usual along with the flowers. That was great for the spring vegetable crops.  The peas were great and we had a long crop of lettuce and spinach.

Then summer came. It went from cold and rainy to very hot in late June.  The tomatoes and other warm weather crops didn’t do much in June and even though they like the hot weather were so far behind that tomatoes were several weeks behind usual.  My main garden is about 20 years old. Despite rotating crops I have a build-up of soil diseases that attack tomato plants. I decided to grow tomatoes in new areas outside the fenced in vegetable garden. Unfortunately the combination of weather and critters eating the tomatoes made the tomato crop the worst in many years.

One bright spot was that we had to repair some buried pipes in late winter. The contractor left an area of subsoil after they left. When it started to warm up I worked some compost into the soil and seeded it.  The grass seed was left over from previous years  and didn’t germinate very well. I did get a couple of volunteer tomatoes from seeds that must have been in the compost from the compost pile.  I think they must have been an accidental hybrid from a Roma variety and some other.  I decided to just leave it for the tomatoes until next year and will plant grass there. The fruits were like Roma but much larger. They were very meaty and had few seeds. The plants were very prolific. I wish I could buy seeds for tomatoes like that!

This year was probably my best years ever for corn and peppers.  The peppers were late like the tomatoes.  The corn was also late, but I normally plant it late.  The farmer’s market has early corn but not so much late in the season so I plant my corn to be ready late in the season. 

Winter squash was a major disappointment.  The squash vine borers got them. I have lots of problems with vine borers  I grow squash or  pumpkins on the ground. I have not had problems ever when I grow squash vertically on my squash towers. This year I only managed a few small squash.  Onions and garlic were also a disappointment.   They do most of their growing during May and June. Once the summer solstice arrives in late June they start to form their bulbs. I think the cold May and June prevented a lot of root and leaf growth so they were only able to produce small bulbs.

2011 was a good example that you will normally have good luck with some crops and bad luck with others in a given year. The weather can’t be optimum for all crops, almost by definition.  Enjoy the ones you had success with and get over the failures. Next year is almost guaranteed to be different.

Right now just about the only thing to do gardening wise is go through all the seed catalogs that have been showing up in the mail and wait out the long Wisconsin winter.  Below are some pictures of some of the fresh vegetables we enjoyed this year.