this year's garden results

I'm rather disappointed with this year's garden.  It wasn't well organized, the weeds got away from me to the point of ridiculous.  I'm sure my neighbour with the perfect grass and robotic like garden has been cursing me.  I have a  plan for next year to downsize the garden in such a way to help with productivity and my management of it.  I'm going to try the "square-foot gardener method".  It should be less labour intensive.  I'd love to set up my gravity feed watering system but I'll have to see if I can afford it.

This year resulted in only two pumpkins, dried beans, some tomatoes and a handful of beets.  I did get a large batch of weld for dying.  Each year I learn what to change and  what works where.  Since this moving I've had to learn what works for our new location.

this year's garden

This year I'm focusing a bit more on the garden.  Giving it some more structure you might say.  I'm still going to have "the three sisters" (that's beans, corn and squash), tomatoes, lettuce, kale, leeks, brussel sprouts, hot peppers, strawberries and a bunch of herbs.  I'm blocking out the gardens with bricks and plan to lay down some pea gravel on the pathways to reduce mud and weeds.  Sheet mulching is my friend, and free newspapers for me to do it make even more friends ;-)  I may put some amaranth again because it was so pretty at the back fence but it didn't yield as much as I had hoped.  I'd need a field of it to feed me for more than a couple of meals, darn it.  Same with the quinoa

Now that's the back garden.  My flowers are slowly expanding.  The Echinacea came back nicely and I should be getting some daisies from my mom, herbs from Diane, and peppermint from David.  Now if I can just get the water collection system up and running.  Why do most things have to cost money?  No fair :-P