Harvest Done

We've enjoyed our gardens' harvest this year, but harvest season is pretty much over.

We have an amazing cherry tree that produces cherries in thick clumps like grapes. It produced like a charm earlier this summer, but had obviously gotten too tall. Now, as the leaves begin to fall, it is time to begin trimming back the branches for next year.

We've plucked up the tomato plants. The tomatoes didn't do very well this year, but we think it may have had something to do with the steel cages we used, because nothing else planted near the cages grew. We hadn't had problems in the past, but that was in a traditional open garden rather than a grow box. Next year we'll use wooden grow cages.

Last year we tried to leave carrots and beats in the ground to see if that would work for storing--it didn't (perhaps because we use grow boxes), so we have harvested all of the remaining carrots.

We harvested grapes a couple weeks ago, but apparently waited a bit too long--the squirrels and, probably, raccoons had stolen about half of our rather small crop. Since it is a vine that produces wine grapes (not our choice--it was here when we moved in), and thus full of seeds, we juiced the grapes, but only got about 2 quarts. However, it has only really started producing the last couple of years, so I have hopes that it will go up.

Last year, I had read about using old kiddie wading pools for a garden "boxes," which I tried this year since my kids had put a couple holes in their pool last fall. I had simply drilled a bunch of holes in the bottom to provide drainage; and then placed alternating layers of soil and mulch inside until I had soil up to about 2 inches from the top. Then we added enough additional soil to make three mounds for planting. I placed large rocks (from another area of our property) around the outside of the pool to provide additional support and protection. We planted zucchini and had a good crop.

The peas also did very well this year, and the raspberry bushes we planted two years ago produced a small, but steady supply of berries through much of the summer.

Although we didn't grow enough to get anywhere close enough to supporting our needs, it was an important supplement. The grow boxes we've used the past couple of years have been much more efficient (on a square footage bases) than the more traditional gardening we had been using.

My wife has been busy the last couple weeks dehydrating a lot of food (we decided to do more dehydrating over canning this year)--peaches, bananas, apples. We tend to snack on the dehydrated food, more than an open bottle of fruit that might be in the fridge. She also dehydrated some herbs, and we are drying some herbs we harvested from our garden, to use for seasoning.