Gardening Adventures: The Good, Bad, Ugly

Now that the garden has officially been put to rest for the winter, it's time to reflect on how well (and not so well) we did and what lessons I can pass on to others.

Based on our lessons learned from last year, we decided to change it up a bit this year. I decided to remove Cucumbers and Zuccini - not because I don't love those veggies, but because they just take up too much space. The squash family of veggies like to spread so you need quite a large space for them to move.

Instead, I chose to plant one butternut squash plant which yielded (is that the proper past tense for yield?) six squash - pretty good when you consider the price I paid for that one little plant (about 1.50). They are much cheaper when you get them in seeds but since we planted a little late this year (because of our wedding in Jamaica) I used a home depot card to get all of the flats pre-grown about 3 inches). I guess you could consider this cheating but in my opinion, keeping them from dying is a whole challenge on its own.

We kept tomatoes because they are pretty easy to grow but my cherry tomatoes came out way better than the field tomatoes - I don't think we tied them up properly and should have spaced them out a bit better. Actually, we should have spaced out pretty much everything -when you plant them as little plants or seeds they don't seem that big, but when you consider how big they will get, you have to plan accordingly.

My herbs all did well and you really can't screw those up - water is really all they need.

Peppers: greeen, scotch bonnets, sweet chili's - all turned out great! I had a plan to make home made hot sauce but I just didn't get around to it and I'm blaming Mike Corey haha (Adam doesn't eat hot stuff so I really had no motivation to make this and a partner in crime was needed but he was too busy traveling the world in 80 days. (I highly recomend you check out his videos).

Red Swiss Chard: these things grow like weeds and I ended up giving most of it away

Brussle Sprouts: FAIL

Our first mistake is that we bought way too much and I felt compelled to plant them all (mistake number 1). This meant I put them way too close together and little did I realize how big they would get.

To be honest, I'm not sure I'd grow them again, even if I did it properly. For the amount we'd actually eat, it's much easier to just buy them from the local farmers market.

Peas: FAIL

I planted these from seeds that we had left over from last year. I don't know what happened but only 5 of the 30 plus that I planted actually sprouted. I planted then along the perimeter and adam put up some chicken wire so they had somthing to climb (and to keep out the bunnies).

What's in store for next year? Well for starters, we're going to expand so that I can separate my herbs and give them their own space. I'd also like to try some broccoli or cauliflower. I'm hesitant to try lettuce because they attract way too many animals.

I'm going to decrease the amount of tomato plants - by September I didn't even want to look at them and its only now in November that I'm open to eating them again.

Next summer, I plan to post on each veggie throughout the season rather than just waiting until the end because there is just way too much to type and I just got lazy throughout the summer.

Do you have any success stories or lessons learned?

Harvesting My Blog

So I may have neglected this blog thing for a while... my problem is my hobbies become "chores" and then I resent doing the activity so much that I just retreat. Knowing my usual patterns, I've decided to try and make this more manageable and set some realistic goals that I can actually commit to.

I'd like to give this a new name, and eventually a new domain, but for now, I'm going to focus on content and see where that goes (I think it may be premature to come up with a new name, before I really know where this is going to take me).

I don't want this to be just another food blog, because there are a million out there. Now don't get me wrong, there are some great ones out there that I love to follow (insert shameless promo here) such as Happy or Hungry.

But what I do hope is that I can share what I'm learning and hopefully, help someone else reading along the way.

So here's my vision (drum roll please)...

• Educate myself and readers on herbs and spices (I'm going to pick one item from my spice bible each week and we're going to try out a recipe and learn everything there is to know about that spice - growing, harvesting, history of origin, what to pair it with etc.
  
• Discover the local markets in our small communities (can we say ROAD TRIP?)
• Best bang for your buck - how can we take full advantage of cooking from scratch, preserving goods, learn to be self sustaining?
• Food politics - I took a great course in University about the subject and it made me question things like fair trade, organic foods, fad food movements etc.
  

Of course, a vision is only a theoretical idea until its actually put into place AND, the biggest factor I haven't included is understanding your audience....

So, I'm putting it out to the universe - what topics would you like to see covered? What do you think about my proposed vision? I need direction so please, any suggestions would be much appreciated.