Gardening in 2024
2024's gardening season was warm, dry, and long. Long enough to grow potatoes, followed by green beans, in one raised bed, and garlic followed by basil and peppers in another. Long enough to grow ripe Chanterais and watermelon, even with a slightly late start. We had the usual good amount of cucumber and zucchini.
This was my best melon harvest yet. More than a dozen small Chanterais (a smooth-skinned canteloupe) and five large personal-sized watermelons. One of them weighed 4 kilograms!
Two halves of a large watermelon the size of a small watermelon on a bamboo cutting board.
We had 3-4 cucumbers a day in July and August and were still picking one every other day in mid-October.
A cucumber shaped like a question mark, wondering, on October 10, when summer will end.
August, September, and October were all about beans, beans, beans. So many bean pods.
A large steel bowl full of green bean pods on October 24.
Our long season allowed all my sweet peppers to fully ripen. We grew yellow Corno di Toro and red Carmen peppers and cooked them into piperade and similar dishes.
A large steel bowl stacked full of long, thin, yellow and red peppers.
I planted Shishito peppers this summer and neglected them for more than a month. Summer went so long that there was time for them to revive, flower, and produce a pretty good crop of fruit before the first frost. I'll grow these again next year and take better care of them.
Charred and salted green shishito peppers on a white plate.
For our raised beds, the only change I'm planning to make next year is to not grow potatoes and plant some other vegetables instead in the early half of the season. More spinach and mustard greens, perhaps. I got a Kitazawa Seed Company catalog in the mail on Saturday and am looking forward to browsing it for ideas.
The other major producer in my backyard was our Damson plum tree. I made over a dozen pints of jam, which I've been eating regularly, and a liter of Damson liqueur, which I've been holding for the new year.
We compost all of our household vegetable waste. Coffee grounds, egg shells, potato peels, banana skins, etc., and also fallen leaves and soiled straw from the chicken coop. Every year we transfer the mature composted matter into our raised beds. Despite this, we seem to be running a small nutrient deficit. Plants languished in my one bed where I have not planted a late summer crop of beans, and I resorted to using a fertilizer solution to wake up the Shishito peppers. I'm considering the removal of some tired soil and replacing it with commercial compost.
2024 was an uncomplicated year for backyard gardening here. Access to tap water, of course, means we're always gardening in easy mode. We had no hail, no late or early freezes, and plenty of sun. 2025 could be different. We will have to wait and see.