Back to Step 1

Sometimes it feels like you are back at step one more than once. That is true when it comes to gardening. Every year a new version of your garden in born and although you have been down this path before it is still all new. This can be both exciting and overwhelming at the same time. You know what works and what doesn't, however, there are so many variables going on that each year brings new successes and failures.

Last year was a hard one for us. We started out great. We had awesome indoor germination and growth followed by healthy transplants and an easy out door planting season. That was followed by spotty outdoor germination and hail. To top that off we fell victim to the new Facebook algorithms and lost a good portion of our customers. It's very demoralising at the end of a growing season for customers to ask why you didn't post anything this year. But not quite as sad as it is to lovingly take care of a garden that falls victim to hail. It still makes us tear up a wee bit! And bugs how could we forget the flea beetles that had the largest numbers in Sask since the 30's. We are a pesticide free garden so the bugs sure bugged us this year. Also spraying killing plants with homemade bug killer (vinegar and soap) not such a a great idea! 

So how do you plan a new season off of numbers you are not sure how to interpret? It's easy, you wing it!

If you recall we start our garden plan with Step 1  going over what worked and what did not work last year. 

What worked:

Beans and beets

beans beans and more beans

tomatoes that weathered the storm, but had lower than average yields

What didn't work:

everything else.

Okay that is not entirely true a lot of things worked but the hail decreased the yields and we had a lot of atypical growth from true tested products.

Normally we are able to decided to take a few things away at this point. For example in 2017 we grew purple beans. They do great, but turn green when you cook them so we axed them to make space for Asparagus beans. The hail took out the asparagus beans so who knows how they will do.

So we will move onto step two and do our 1st draft of the 2019 plan.  What would you like to see us plant in 2019?
More on that soon

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Hayley and Marc