How wouldyou rate your 2016 garden season?

Drought and pests.

My 2016 garden season was great. I'm still harvesting baby choy and a beautiful mix of leaf lettuce to share and enjoy eating. We still have tomatoes ripening on a window sill downstairs, so we will have fresh tomatoes into December. We had a bumper crop of sweet potatoes This was the first time I had harvested enough calendula blooms to make lotion/balm (which I love). Calendula plants are still enjoying the cool. I harvested a couple bushels of tuberose bulbs harvested and dried and in storage for next years garden. I even harvested a 5 gallon bucket of hickory nuts the other day. The Kiss-Me-Over-The Garden-Gate that I planted last year and expected to grow then, grew this year (totally new to me). I have harvested more zinnia seed and gave away more cut zinnia blooms than ever before - the zinnias were beautiful and didn't get frosted down until the night of November 9th. The 4 eggplant plants I planted mid summer produced until frost. My new 4-Row Perennial Garden bloomed with various plants from spring through fall. The Newbie Garden my hubby worked up for me, did great with firecracker colored zinnia, orange cosmo and red castor beans. The rains were perfect and not once did we see drought conditions as it was a steady job keeping all the grass mowed and things looking good, around here. I manged to host two different garden clubs with tours of my flower gardens. I have gathered a tremendous amount of seeds for future year(s) and for sharing and trading. Here are few pictures of things I really enjoyed that made 2016 a great gardening season for me.

This message was edited Nov 28, 2016 12:58 PM

This message was edited Nov 28, 2016 1:02 PM

Sounds like we had a similar year Brenda, even though there are a lot of miles and 3 zones between us. I tried sweet potatoes for the very first time. I had a 100 gallon black Rubbermaid horse water trough that I used to use as a rainbarrel that had an unsealable crack so I used it as a sweet potato planter. I ordered a pack of 10 cuttings all the way from Veseys on the east coast. They looked dead when I got them but put them in water under lights for a few days and they rooted. Everyone told me there was no way I would harvest any potatoes up here but I got an awesome crop. I think it was a combination of heat generated by the black trough and with a wet year the drainage kept them drier. We had no frost until October.. I grow a phenomenal amount if flowers in pots and they required very little watering. We also had a bumper crop of butternut squash
Keith

What a disappointing gardening year! I had a dry spring, a cool summer and then a warm fall. I must have put in a thousand seeds and so little came up. Glad to say all of last years' plants did well, that was my only consolation.

Bad drought this year took it's toll on everything. We did get a decent amount of cucumbers, but that was about it.

We had a cold wet spring, late frost, then a very dry summer. Hardly any tomatoes, and the chinese veggies I bought were mismarked and the bok choy turned out to be plain old kale, the eggplant struggled and did not do well, and the Blue Lake green beans were also wrong, they were pole beans that didn't produce much at all. Maybe next year..the farmer's lament

It was okay, but wish it was better,

It was too rainy for spring and killed all the new plants in the new bed i started last fall. i wont be planting in the spot again. i didn't prep my beds this past fall and it was a not so super spring. if i had fertilized / mulched the bed better in fall it would have been a soo diffrent. i had some family issues and just been struggling with the blues......i made efforts to not loose the roses to my problems.i want to get my flower beds back to the way they were and not let these pesky weeds overgrow them like before. As much as i have love for nature and the delicateness of it i HATE the wild native purple morning glory that you can't get rid of. Almost every seed germinates and chokes out anything in the way. other natives barely survive its smothering nature. on a lighter note, i have a ton of pink ruellia growing everywhere and tropical milkweeds feeding the last of the butterflies before they go away till springtime. Getting to see my Queens tears / friendship bromeliad Billbergia nutans bloom one more time as winter approaches. i will start treating my excesive rose garden with medina hasta grow fertilizer. Possibly greensand treatment too. Its my fall /winter prep for spring blooms. we will see in the next 2 months. wish me luck.

We are affected by drought here so it was so-so.

We spent a lot of energy and money on the garden this summer, reclaiming it from years of neglect, but I'm happy with the results. Crocosmia in picture below got divided this fall so hopefully we'll have more (and more hummingbirds) next summer.

Mine was disappointing because we moved, and the movers left our plants to die before they planted them, and I didn't have enough funds or time to replant our garden so I had no plants at all. Next year.........

The weather just did not cooperate this Summer, and into the Fall it was very dry. Had to water with city water and that just doesn't do the trick like a good rain shower.

the spring was very short and got into the 90's real fast this year. had some erratic rains that killed off some drought tolerant plants during summer. i lost about 50 percent of my iris plants and the fall seemed longer than it normally is. planted a lot of garlic in my rose beds to keep down the ants and it worked like a charm. my huge rosemary got butchered by my boyfriend and the bush never gained back its life and died. i was upset with the investment of my time and hope to make a space have some color to it.... but its apart of a gardeners life.2016 was a very strange year ...