Year 3. This was to be the year of the garden.

We cleared more trees. I dug, cleaned out the old stuff, got the weeds contained. We hauled in top soil. I installed drip irrigation. All the tomatoes split from the heavy rains (too much water). The peppers just plain never came in. The beets started strong and whithered, the peas produced hardly anything. Lettuce and spinach did OK, but that's not enough. The blueberry bush is just starting, it will be a few years before that produces anything meaningful. The strawberries produced about 6 berries and that was it. Herbs are doing fair, fennel and oregano doing very well, rosemary and basil hanging on. We also lost 6 laying hens to predators (eagle, hawk, fox, weasel or mink and something else, not sure what). If it was up to me to feed the family, it would be a lean year. Our nut trees don't produce on even numbered years, so to the walnuts and hickory nuts, which are abundant on odd numbered years, are totally absent this year.

All together, I learned that the Community Supported Agriculture program (CSA) was the best thing I could do for planning my food allocation for the year. Yes it's a risk (with a CSA, you pay the farmer in advance, if the crops fail, that's the risk you're taking) and at the beginning I was really getting a little worn out from the kohlrabi, but later as the more "traditional" crops came in, things got better.

But I definitely have learned a bunch about where to situate a home if I were to do it all over again. In short - not here. Yes, we have a nice pond and we love the woods, but I'll never buy a property again where it's 90% shaded - no more than 50% woodland, a good open south exposure to full sun is a must. I like being up on a hill the way I am, but I can also see the advantages to being in flatter terrain.

We're not moving, and I'm not clearing any more trees...but I am working on better local sourcing of meat and other food.

Seems like everything went wrong for you. A bad year is always discouraging. It gives some appreciation of the pioneers whose gardens were a matter of eating or not eating.

Shade is a killer when it comes to food production. I know a lot of people who would like to garden in their urban backyards, but few get enough hours of summer sun to pull it off. A treed acreage has the same problem. Sometimes a greenhouse can help, but it becomes much more intensive in terms of the work.

Good pollination can be a big issue as well. A week of wet and cool when fruit trees are blooming can lead to a very thin crop. I'm starting my own colony of mason bees (a.k.a. orchard bees) to supplement all the native bees I have been carefully encouraging.

I like the CSA concept. Some farmers are tired of the mass production agribusiness treadmill. And most people don't have the time to dedicate themselves to producing their own food. So, a potential win-win.

This was a bad year for me, too.

We had a long cold spring with a LOT of rain, and it just kept raining. Summer arrived (they say), still cold, with cold winds. It is a celebration even now (August 2) to have a day in the 70s. I think we've had maybe three whole days that crossed the 80ºF mark. Nights are still dropping into the low 50s.

A very late freeze wiped out the cherry crop, and probably some of the blueberries, there weren't many berries. The late blueberries are still green.

Since all my old chickens were killed, I planned to get a new (small) batch this spring. By the time it was warm enough to get chicks, the feed stores weren't selling them anymore. I had to buy six from a neighbor.

My carefully handpicked collection of black soldier fly larvae is just stagnating, none are hatching into adults.

It was too wet and cold to plant much other than peas and lettuce.

The tomatoes are only growing slowly, I didn't even bother with peppers, because they need even more heat than tomatoes.

I have yet to check under the mulch to see how the potatoes are doing, but the tops are dying down now.

A local Mennonite group has just bought a small building to sell fresh produce. Right now, they're trucking it in from the warm side of the mountains, but plan on selling local stuff in the future.

It's been a big disappointment. Oh, well, I guess I should go in and make my bed... three wool blankets and a down comforter... it sure doesn't feel like August.

Sue

Do y'all store your own seeds? I know different years I have had radically different results in my gardening. One year I had minimum potatoes, but I had more tomatoes than I could handle. I canned and canned tomatoes. Luckily other folks had good results with your veggies, and I purchased some food to put up. I wished I lived where I could get a share of a CSA.

I keep my seeds from one year to the next, but I haven't been organized enough to save my own seed from my own crops. I know how to do it, I just haven't.

Some years are better than others for certain crops. Heat (or lack of it) and rain (or lack of it) all affect the plants. Some plants are fussier about soil quality than others.

Contact your local Cooperative Extension Service and ask if they have info on local CSAs. You can find your Ext. Service through the USDA site [url= http://www.csrees.usda.gov/Extension/]here.[/url]

Sue

same here..our city backyard tomato patch is a washout and none of the onion sets took.if i can keep the raccoon's out of the grape vines i might get enough to bulk up a batch of wild grape wine.
a few years ago i got heaps of tomato's,onions,peppers and the herbs to make up gallons of pasta sauce and still have enough for eating.all this explains why so many family's moved into city's and took jobs in industry's so they could eat more than weeds and muskrats.

Well now I'm feeling badly, because after a late start our garden is absolutely going great guns. The only problem is that it's coming all at once.

Tomatoes are producing and flowering, we've already had peppers from the greenhouse, green and yellow zucchini for stir-frys, raspberries by the gallon, many quarts of tame saskatoons as big as blueberries, new potatoes with fresh dill and cream, baby carrots thinned out of the rows, and more fresh young peas than we know what to do with. We should have fresh beets in a week. Meanwhile the corn has tassels, the onions are over 16" tall, the scarlet runner beans are flowering, and the pumpkins and winter squash are stretching by the hour. Argh! We can't keep up!

Doug..about how much farther north from Minneapolis are you?..
our corn came in weeks ago.i think the garden problem here was too much heat and rain early in the season.

I'm a fair bit farther north, around 53 deg N latitude. Shorter growing season (average 140 frost-free days per year), but longer hours of sunlight in the summer. First frost anytime after Sept. 10, and a killing frost before the end of Sept. So when August rolls around, everything in the garden is on notice: get busy, only 6 weeks left.

"Argh! We can't keep up!"

Doug, that's just AWFUL! I'm nearly in tears, thinking of you trying to keep up with the harvest.

Do you deliver?

Sue