2014 Harvest Recap

Looking back on 2014, I can say that I really started honing my veggie gardening skills.  Overall, I hauled in 75 pounds and 2.2 ounces of veggies (at least, as far as I kept track of).  That is just over 34 kilograms for my non US readers.  Pretty decent! 

Some key take-aways of mine this year:

What I will do again:

• Plant cucumbers and eggplant – they are my most productive crops and I found several new recipes this year that allow me to use up all my fresh produce.
• Plant Early Girl, Juliet Roma Grape, Roma, and Sweet 100 Cherry tomatoes.
• Plant all the same peppers, but maybe an extra Gypsy pepper since it was my most productive pepper for only having one plant.

What I won’t do again:

• Plant Big Boy and Bradley Heirloom tomatoes – they produced a decent amount of fruit, but were very susceptible to being eaten by insects and other pests.
• Plant so many jalapenos – I ended up not being able to use a lot of them

What I’ll change:

• Plant more green beans in my shadiest garden bed.  They produced well in the shady veggie bed, much better than most other veggies.
• Try squash plants one more time, but with row covers next year so that the squash vine borers don’t destroy all my plants.
• Find a delicious okra recipe.  Okra is definitely the easiest veggie to grow in the Central Texas garden.  Unfortunately, most of my okra ends up going to waste because I’ve not liked any of the recipes I’ve tried so far.
• Start more plants seedlings indoors and have them going throughout the year.  I still try to plant too many of one plant all at the same time.  I need to plant fewer plants at a time, but have several successions of the plants to elongate my growing season.
• Keep my fall/winter veggies on an automatic timer.  I was good about watering my summer veggies, but think that I got lax during the fall when there was more rainfall.  However, it still wasn’t enough or consistent enough to help my plants grow quickly.
• Fertilize more.  I’m good about putting compost in the beds when I plant new transplants, but haven’t kept up with regular fertilizing during the growing season.

Harvest Totals (since April)

• 11 lb 11.1 oz Marketmore 76 Cucumbers (11)
• 11 lb 0.1 oz Black Beauty Eggplant (12)
• 5 lbs 6.3 oz Black Beauty Zucchini (3)
• 5 lb 4.0 oz Long Eggplant (21)
• 5 lbs Cherry Bell Radishes
• 3 lb 12.0 oz Early Girl Tomato (12)
• 3 lb 7.9 oz Okra (63)
• 3 lb 5.5 oz Pic-N-Pic Summer Squash (5)
• 3 lbs Giant Fordhook Swiss Chard
• 2 lb 7.5 oz Juliet Roma Grape Tomato
• 2 lb 2.4 oz Bush Blue Lake 274 Green Beans
• 2 lb 2.3 oz Roma Tomato (22)
• 1 lb 15.9 oz Sweet 100 Cherry Tomato
• 1 lb 10.4 oz Big Boy Tomato (3)
• 1 lb 10.2 oz Pablano Pepper (22)
• 1 lb 10.1 oz Green Bell Sweet Pepper (10)
• 1 lb 8.7 oz Gypsy Sweet Peppers (14)
• 1 lb 7.3 oz oz Bradley Heirloom Tomato (4)
• 1 lb 6.6 oz Spaghetti Squash (1)
• 1 lb 2.0 oz Acorn Squash (1)
• 1 lb 1.0 oz Butternut Squash (1)
• 15.7 oz Jalapeno (9)
• 13.7 oz Mammoth Melting Sugar Peas
• 11.6 oz Mucho Nacho Jumbo Jalapeno (13)
• 3.8 oz Serrano Pepper (14)
• 2.1 oz Cayenne Pepper (9)

Goal for 2015 is to haul in over 100 pounds of fresh food!