This was our first year of gardening on a much larger scale - the old 15' by 15' garden was enlarged to roughly 90' by 90'.

We had a bad year for tomatoes - a late frost hurt the whole neighborhood, but one thing we didn't prepare for is keeping on top of all that we were needing to harvest.

Too many melons ened up outside the fencing for the deer. We didn't time the sweet corn harvest well enough and most of it became very starchy - part of this too, I believe, was my planting too close to the dent corn.

The spring red wheat we planted grew well, and I harvested it, but the threshing is alot more labor intensive than I expected. I have about 1/3 threshed and the rest is tarped from the recent rains until I can spend an afternoon threshing out the rest of the seed. We planted some hard, red winter wheat in an unprotected pasture last month - unlike in the spring when everything is green, the deer are on this patch of green like a magnet, so it's hard to tell how much of this area will live.

As another post mentioned, our melons and squash, too, ran way beyond the recommended spacing. My wife also thought she could infill a vine or two along rows where some seed didn't take and these vines all but choked out our artichokes and started growing into our grapes.

Our peas and green beans all did real well, in fact we look to be getting a second harvest of them soon. Several potato varieties also did real well - the kennebecs, carolas, and russets all produced well. A couple of the red varietes didn't do nearly as well.

Critters seem to be an ever present problem. The deer fencing worked on the big critters - even rabbits, but gophers, voles, moles, and ground squirrels seem to get in at will. We've been able to trap many of them, but they just keep coming!

All in all, we are real happy with our first year. Next year we hope to improve on our efforts.

Thanks to this site, and the knowledge of its members, we gleaned a tremendous amount of infomration as we started this project back at the end of winter. And the fruits of that shared knowledge is now stocking up in our pantry - Thank You!!!