I wish I had more time to keep this blog up. It was a middling year for the garden, but a better one in the greenhouse. Unfortunately zealous young helpers broke a couple of panes about the time the weather was turning cold and we were not able to replace them before it froze. Too bad, we hand lots of tomatos and peppers that would have ripened into late October.

Spent most of the summer working on the house however, and the garden was a second place project. Really I need to rework the whole thing. Many of my raised beds are in the wrong place and the pathways between the boxes are too narrow at 24". There is not sufficient room between them for things like wheelbarrows and I am constantly dragging hoses across the plants in the corners of the beds.

If I can possibly make time in the spring I will raise each bed by another 2x6 lift and I will add 2x2 trellis supports at the ends of each bed. These will act to guide the hoses as well as support the beds a bit better, and allow me to rotate climbing crops throughout the garden.

One disturbing development is that I had a sudden eruption of Canad Thistle in several of the beds. I was not paying attention and didn't notice until several had gone to seed. This means a big job next year and I am tempted to solarize the beds where they turned up and write those beds off for next year.

The soil in the greenhouse is getting depleted after five years and I really need to move it to a new site and let the old site lie fallow or under a crop of green manure. My original plan was to build two identical, adjacent greenhouse sites and to mount skids underneath the structure itself so that I could move it back and forth every second year or so. I still think this is a good idea but the need to park a car in the new greenhouse space is a bit of a hindrance.

We have lost three of the four apple trees I planted a few years ago. Only a single dwarf Fuji survives and I am seriously thinking of putting on an addition to the house where it is planted. Fruit trees just don't do well here and while I still think I could make them go, it is going to require much more time and effort than I can expend right now.

However, I am mostly happy with our gardening efforts. We have succeeded in putting up a winter's worth of preserved vegetables each fall and have demonstrated that we could indeed survive off the garden if we had too. Although I would get tired of potato soup...

Each year we get a bit better at some things and we add a few more as practice makes us more efficient and gives us more time. We have become very good at growing beans, peas, carrots, potatoes, herbs, onions, tomatoes and peppers. We would still like to grow apples and grapes.

We have had very good corn, but it requires tremendous amounts of water and it depletes the soil very rapidly, more rapidly than we can make compost. Ironically, about the time we decided to stop growing corn because of the usual availability of VERY fresh sweet corn, the production of corn switched from the edible sweet corn to starchy ethanol stock. Really though, since the town put everyone on a water meter, I have been reluctant to use the quantity of water that corn requires anyway.

Bees and chickens still remain projects in the future. The bees I think I can handle, but the chickens will need daily care and I am not willing to do them unless the rest of the family decides they are going to take on some of the responsibility.

For now, my interests have returned to building furniture.