Now with the first frost, the last of my garden yield for this year is finished. This year’s garden had some highs and lows, but in the end many lessons were learned.

This year started out really strong. The preparation I put in was somewhat different than in years prior. Instead of boxing in the plots, I tilled everything down and spread a layer of straw over the top to create ground cover; and then used straw piles to create ditches between the rows.

This strategy ended up producing some decent results at first, but required a lot more work to maintain than I was able to dedicate. Using the straw ditches ended up being a really great technique; as long as I regularly walked over them to keep any plants from growing they decomposed nicely to fertilize the soil. Lots of fungal activity.

The straw ground cover did not perform nearly as well. The right balance needs to be struck between how much cover you have to keep water in the soil, and the amount of exposed ground. Just using plants and straw served to be good for water control - not having nearly as much cracking as in years prior. The problem occurred later in the season when the grass and tall weeds really started to boom.

Due to this, by the end of the season most of my desirable plants had been choked out. The only things that produced well were early lettuce, squash, tomatoes, okra, and cucumbers as they were able to grow over the ground cover or came in very early. Low plants such as turnips and beets did very well to start, but died off when the grass overwhelmed the garden. Long-seasoned leafs such as spinach, swiss chard, and kale did very poorly in general.

I only ended up getting one good turnip this year, but it was a monster. I once again had more squash and zucchini than I could possibly eat. The tomatoes that did the best were the volunteers. I threw so many rotten tomatoes and squash around the yard this year I expect that I will have volunteers all over the place next year.

Next year I am going to build raised beds and see how they perform in comparison. I also am going to try using mulch instead of straw as top-cover. I think with how the squash performed this year, I will spread them out further and see if they won’t get even larger than they did this year. I would really like to figure out how to get more melons, peppers, and eggplants out of my garden. I think for those I am going to have to get them to sprout earlier indoors rather than waiting until after the last frost. I also plan on figuring out potatoes. Getting a good yield from them still eludes me.