2020 Garden summary

First, a soil breakdown.  This was the base soil:

I covered the sand with a layer of contractor's paper to control weeds, then on top of that a mixture of the straw from last year's bales...

...and some bags of fall leaves that had been sitting for several months.  

We topped that with 4ish inches of compost from the city.  

And most importantly, we decorated the wall.

It needed some color before things started to come up.

4/3 Planted small onion plants and the following seeds: brussels sprouts, broccoli, kale, peas, alyssum, carrots, spinach, lettuce, radishes
4/8 McKenzie plants onion plants, marigold and tomato transplants, beans, carrots, kale, and spinach

4/13 Snow day, covered garden overnight

4/14 Another below freezing night, covered plants again, lost a tomato to frost
4/17 McKenzie replants a tomato plant
4/22 Replanted 1 broccoli that never came up, 1 kale, and middle row of carrots (that wasn't getting any water--when it did get water ALL the seeds came up, heh heh); planted 7 green onions next to wall (only one ever came up), left row of beets, and next foot of radishes to the right; planted basil, oregano, sage, bee balm transplants.
Bruce and Axel plant peas
4/25 Gabe plants peas
4/26 Planted tomato, pepper transplats; marigold, zinnia, nasturtium, sunflower, 3 each in back of rows left to right tendergreen/purple/yellow bush beans, kentucky (l) and blue lake (r) pole beans seeds; replanted lettuce.  Michelle plants carrot, onion, lettuce, jalapeno seeds; marigold, tomato, and basil transplants.

5/1 replanted spinach
5/4 pole beans come up, but their stems are pinched off close to the ground.  I don't know what is doing this.
5/9 Radish harvest (3 radishes)
5/11 Ocean picks all of the new kale that I replanted, leaving little stubs behind and no leaves.
5/12 Annie leaves rabbit gate open accidentally and all that's left of the green beans is eaten
5/14 planted middle row of beets, attempted to rearrange 1st row beets, Rafe planted his box of carrots, replanted a row of carrots, planted next section of radishes, harvested more radishes.  Noticed first tomato fruit on the plant that seems to be doing worst (it is not growing as much as the others and has yellower leaves).

5/15 pruned my 5 tomato plants, put up tomato cages and supports

Here's how all the things looked on 5/17. Nasturtiums, marigolds, sunflowers, alyssum, zinnias, bee balm:

Potatoes, beets, onions, radishes, carrots:

Lettuce, spinach, kale, bush beans, peas, peppers, tomatoes:

5/18 lettuce is very wilty in the day, bitter tasting.  Attempted to devise a cover or shade for it, but it is cumbersome.  Next year we'll need to plant lettuce in the shade of something else.  

5/26 rearranged beets doing pretty well.  Tried to move a volunteer sunflower that was shading the others and the radishes; not looking good.  Resowed 10 Kentucky Wonders on left, 11 Blue Lake on right.  Sowed 2 more of green, purple, and yellow bush beans each.  Sowed a row of cilantro behind cherry tomatoes.

I am on vacation for 6 weeks.  Drew sent me a picture in the middle of my trip.

And this is when I got home.

7/20 Severely pruned tomatoes that had overgrown and tied them up.  Pulled out dead kale leaves.  Pulled out dead snap pea plants.  

Staked peppers--they had fallen over and the fruits were getting sun scalded.

Harvested beets, beans, many tomatoes, and first broccoli (it was tasty, but had a chewy texture similar to asparagus).  

More tomatoes.

Beautiful peppers

7/27 Harvested onions, beans...

...carrots...

...more tomatoes.

7/28 planted cucumbers in the cutworm bed with paper cup collars, watermelons in mounds by the sunflowers, and some pumpkin seeds that I'm sure are bad.  Sprayed the kale vigorously with insect soap because it is encrusted with aphids. 

8/6 pumpkins did come up, but were promptly eaten--probably have cutworms in the little beds too.  Planted another 2 rows of snap peas, 3 4-seed clumps of beets, 2 spinach seeds under every drip (the beets and spinach never came up).  Sprayed kale, brussels, and broccoli for aphids. Potatoes plants starting to die.

8/19 Tomatoes infested with grasshoppers.  

We lead a might campaign and feed them all to the ducks.  

9/8 harvested tomatoes before we left on a trip so they wouldn't get overripe.

9/15 pulled overgrown lettuce, harvested all potatoes...

...thinned carrots again...

...pulled spent green beans...

...tied up cucumbers which were blossoming nicely...

 pulled dead nasturtiums, pulled dead zinnias (water had been left off a couple days and they hadn't lasted), pruned dead branches off tomatoes, pulled dead pineapple sage and half a dead marigold, found a ton of grubs where the onions used to be and in the potato bed and fed them to the ducks

10/25 harvested a bunch of green tomatoes, peppers, and cilantro, pulled up basil and oregano to dry

So many supersweets!

10/26-27 Snow and below freezing temps

10/30 pulled out all the dead things after the frost and put them in the compost bin.

Pest summary: We avoided squash bugs by planting cucubrits late, but we planted so late we didn't get any cucubrits anyway.  Cabbage aphids were completely out of control (I tried to keep up with them and spray them a couple times, but I will need a different sprayer if I'm going to do that again--hand cramps!).  They didn't kill the plants, but they made the fruits very difficult to eat.  We had a kale and sausage soup one night and on close inspection the flecks I thought were black pepper were actually little aphid bodies.  Blech.  You can see all the cabbage aphid bodies floating around in the air after Isaac pulled our Brussels sprouts which we never ate because I didn't think I could get all the aphids out of the nooks and crannies.  

The grasshoppers got bad, but we were able to pick those off pretty easily by hand.  We tried covering onions and potatoes with grass clippings to protect them from sunburn, but we had lawn grubs in our grass, and now have lawn grubs in our garden beds.  I think they killed the pineapple sage and marigolds and potatoes in their respective beds.  The cutworms got all the green beans, but didn't get to the cucumbers that I gave paper cup collars to.  

Star growers: curly leaf kale!  We loved our spinach but it didn't come up very well in the bed I had it in.  Cilantro did amazingly in the shade of the tomatoes.  The Super Sweets are THE cherry tomato.  My husky cherries and Sun Sugars were good, but not as candy-like or as prolific as the super sweets.  

Needs help: Carrots are short and stubby--not surprising with the sand that was underneath our nice growing medium.  In places they actually pushed themselves out of the ground when they got to the sandy soil.  Isaac turned the soil for me when we pulled everything out, so hopefully that will help next year.  Tomatoes did ok, but probably would've done better if I would not go on vacation for weeks at a time when they need to be tied up and pruned.  Lettuce needs a shadier spot, maybe between other plants.  

The water situation was irritating (as always).  Some of the drips in our drip line let out more water than others, and when I have things growing in a line (like carrots and peas and onions) it has trouble getting the whole line between drip points.  We'll need to think some more about that next year.

I'd also like to start seeds early next year so I can control exactly where things are planted and give some of the stuff a head start.  

Thank you, farmers of the world, for keeping the grocery stores stocked so we don't have to starve off the inadequate fruits of our labors!  Every year we learn a little bit more :)