I have come to the realization that I will not just fail to meet the 1000 pound for produce from my garden within 1 calendar year, but that it will be an epic fail.
As of yesterday, I have harvested 9.555 pounds of produce. While it's true that tomatoes and squash have barely started and that the cabbage will add some weight to my totals, I don't think I'll even make 200 pounds in total this year.
The reason is pretty simple. My garden is more of a traditional kitchen garden. Each day, I go out and pick something for use in the meal that I'm preparing. Since I cook a wide variety of dishes, I have a wide variety of items in the garden. Of the 450-ish square feet of garden space, about 75 square feet is dedicated to herbs, for example. Herbs weigh next to nothing, and although I might make 200 or more harvests of basil, oregano, thyme, dill, and the rest, during the season, they won't weigh-in very heavily compared to planting the same ground with, say, 9 zucchini plants.
We also had bad luck with the strwberries which occupy one complete terrace of my hillside garden this year. The fruits were eaten just before ripening by the animals that live in my yard. Primarily chipmunks, I believe, but quite possibly deer and other nocturnal visitors as well. That cost us a number of pounds of production.
It's true that we are only four months into a 12 month challenge. So there is time, yet. If I were to build cold frames to act as mini-greenhouses and use passive solar heating to keep them warm, I might yet pull out some late season harvests. The difficulty with that is that we are already losing daylight hours as autumn approaches. When the number of available hours of sunlight gets too low, many garden vegetables will stop producing or stop ripening. Others, like lettuce and leafy greens, greatly reduce their rates of growth.
So this year, we will experiment with exending the season as far into the New England autumn as we can, and we'll see how mcuh we can squeak out of the kitchen garden. Next year, though, we will plan for production. We'll plant much larger quantities of vegetables that we can not only eat as they ripen, but which can be effectively preserved.
As of yesterday, I have harvested 9.555 pounds of produce. While it's true that tomatoes and squash have barely started and that the cabbage will add some weight to my totals, I don't think I'll even make 200 pounds in total this year.
The reason is pretty simple. My garden is more of a traditional kitchen garden. Each day, I go out and pick something for use in the meal that I'm preparing. Since I cook a wide variety of dishes, I have a wide variety of items in the garden. Of the 450-ish square feet of garden space, about 75 square feet is dedicated to herbs, for example. Herbs weigh next to nothing, and although I might make 200 or more harvests of basil, oregano, thyme, dill, and the rest, during the season, they won't weigh-in very heavily compared to planting the same ground with, say, 9 zucchini plants.
We also had bad luck with the strwberries which occupy one complete terrace of my hillside garden this year. The fruits were eaten just before ripening by the animals that live in my yard. Primarily chipmunks, I believe, but quite possibly deer and other nocturnal visitors as well. That cost us a number of pounds of production.
It's true that we are only four months into a 12 month challenge. So there is time, yet. If I were to build cold frames to act as mini-greenhouses and use passive solar heating to keep them warm, I might yet pull out some late season harvests. The difficulty with that is that we are already losing daylight hours as autumn approaches. When the number of available hours of sunlight gets too low, many garden vegetables will stop producing or stop ripening. Others, like lettuce and leafy greens, greatly reduce their rates of growth.
So this year, we will experiment with exending the season as far into the New England autumn as we can, and we'll see how mcuh we can squeak out of the kitchen garden. Next year, though, we will plan for production. We'll plant much larger quantities of vegetables that we can not only eat as they ripen, but which can be effectively preserved.
