Ten things I learned in my garden last year

Ok... before I post my... Ten things I learned about starting seedlings I figured I should post about the ten things I learned about my garden from last summer.


1)Snap Peas are awesome- Mine grew over 8 ft tall ... I started them from transplants. I also learned they like milder climates.. I started mine in mid April and they took off but definitely started to shrivel when the heat kicked in. In the picture below you can see them by the window.... they ended up growing so tall they toppled over the railing and kept growing.


2)Sungold cherry tomatoes are the sweetest cherry tomatoes I've ever had. These definitely live up to all the hype. And you can't really buy these in the grocery store (they don't ship well and are prone to splitting). They are hybrids so you can't grow them from the seeds in the fruit.(i.e. no seed saving). Definitely need more than one of these next year. The red cherry tomatoes I grew weren't bad just not as good.


3)Carrots are slow and really are better in milder seasons- while my son loved the summer carrots my daughter didn't b/c they just weren't very sweet. I sowed a second set of seeds late summer and both kids liked those. They ended up being quite sweet. Not very big but as I understand it they don't get very big in this area.

4) Cut worms suck... and you need to get rid of them ASAP. I had broccoli seedlings which were doing great then BAM stupid worms.. they just had no hope. Next year I am going to use bt right away (its a organic treatment for them)

5)You only need one Habanero plant- I had two plants and have enough habeneros in my freezer to last at least a year if not longer. This is one of the two bowls of habaneros I had (I may have even had three I can't remember).


6)Garlic are fun to grow- theoretically my garlic aren't done yet... I put them in last fall and they will be ready for harvest in the summer. But so far so good.

7) When it comes to tomatoes, peppers and eggplant crop rotation is important. I had beautiful eggplants but when you cut them open I realized they didn't ripen... I suspect its b/c I didn't rotate them to a proper location.

8)Composting is fun- this warrants its own blog post so more on this later

9)You can garden without having to do a lot of weeding- I used a hybrid of a lassagna garden and a squarefoot garden... no tilling... and I had very few weeds. I need to use this approach on my older garden spaces which are over run by weeds.

10)Parsley is a biennial- I had no idea... they should last for two years.