I’ve just added a sidebar with harvest poundage, divided into fruits and vegetables. I also put in the totals from 2010, which is when I began weighing my harvests. Learned that from the rest of you garden bloggers. But keeping up with the spreadsheet on Excel is tedious. I seem to run out of time and/or steam. At least for now, I’m up to date for this year.
Navel orange--I ate this one for breakfast this morning and it was incredibly sweet
We have dwarf fruit trees and small raised beds in a tiny southern California yard, plus a rabbit-infested community garden plot that is on a former gravel parking lot. My harvests can’t compare with the huge hauls that I see on other gardening blogs, but it’s enough for us.
My dwarf avocado tree has a good fruit set this year for the first time ever, about 21 avocados.
I harvested 224 lbs last year from my yard. I had hoped for 500 lbs this year with the addition of my new community garden plot. But that little plot hasn’t been as productive as I had hoped, and rats and possums ate almost all of the fruit harvest in our yard this year. As a result, I’ve downgraded my harvest goal to 300 lbs. At this point, I doubt that I’ll even reach that figure given that it’s already August and I have harvested only 130 lbs. Will I be harvesting another 170 lbs in the next five months? I seriously doubt it. Not with all of our night critters.
I trapped yet another possum last night, the fourth one in four weeks. We managed to kill one rat, but I suspect that’s just a drop in the proverbial bucket. I’m typing this at night and I can hear the dang rats running around on our neighbor’s peach trees. Hey, at least I don’t have to contend with deer.
Granny Smith apple
I’ve managed to make and freeze only two quarts of spaghetti sauce so far this summer. I don’t see a heck of a lot of new tomatoes coming along, so that may be it. But my larder is certainly not bare. I still have tomato soup and spaghetti sauce that I canned last year, plus a large assortment of jams and preserves. I made a gallon jar of dill pickles last year and we’re still working on that.
Amish pie pumpkin
Mostly what I grow in my garden is hope. I dream of future harvests. And that’s what these photos are of: future harvests. For example, the Amish pie pumpkins like the one above are supposed to grow up to 90 lbs. Well, I got several beautiful pumpkins this year, but they were mostly between 1 and 2 lbs. Each one will make one pie. And that’s fine. I don’t need a hundred pumpkin pies.
This is pretty much it for my blackberry harvest. I get a few each week, but don't even bother to weigh them. I just pop them right into my mouth.
And that’s how my garden grows.
Vic (my loving spouse) thought it would be a perfect place for a vegetable garden because it was sunny, so I began “farming” it a few years ago. That was right about the time our neighbors to the south planted a solid wall of trees and shrubs in their similar-sized planter.
I can’t grow root crops here because of the gravel. And I’m tired of spading through that gravel each season. So I have decided to try perennials. I put in some thornless black raspberries last spring. I set them into nursery pots buried in the ground, just so the raspberry vines wouldn’t take over the entire plot. (Ha, like something other than weeds would grow in that garden!) On the spur of the moment, I bought a Victoria rhubarb plant and put that into the ground. They like colder winters than we have here, but I should get at least a couple of years of spring rhubarb stalks out of it.
I had good luck with an artichoke plant there in the past, so I decided to plant more artichokes this year. I bought three pots, and was surprised to find that they each had two artichoke plants in them. Then I got another surprise. My original artichoke, which I thought was dead, had sprouted after our recent rain.
