What will you do differently next year?

... or next season, you lucky dogs with two growing seasons.

I will:

1. make wider paths between beds
2. increase spacing between most plants
3. make every inch of the garden easy to reach for tending and picking
4. label religiously and not mix up my cuke varieties
5. start spraying with preventative fungicide (baking soda solution) early in the season
6. cover my curcubits with row covers until female flowering begins
7. mulch like a freak. Then mulch like a maniac.
8. compost compost compost

I am going to try to:

1. make pathways between my raised beds so I don't have to mow there
2. plant less tomatoes per raised bed in order to have better airflow
3. try to choose less varieties of tomatoes to grow and pick only favourites and a few new
4. try to grow more zucchini (didn't get enough)
5. identify tomato diseases earlier next year
6. try my hand at companion planting to prevent insect problems
7. make more flower beds so as to have less mowing to do
8. keep a detailed record of planting times, germination, flowering, fruiting, etc of all my food crop plants, and keep records of favourites so I know what to grow the next year
9. get in-ground irrigation sprinklers because I'm tired of moving the sprinkler around
10. try growing a winter squash for the first time

1. Plan earlier. (Actually, next year's garden is mapped out already.)
2. All "vertical" beds (trellised snap peas, cukes, and pole beans, and staked indeterminate tomatoes) will have a ground-level bed in between for better light and air flow.
3. Strawberries moved off double-dug raised beds (prime real estate in the garden .)
4. Start all plants indoors rather than rely on limited garden center varieties.
5. Have all major garden projects other than planting & tending done before black fly season.

Lots more, I'm sure.

Wayne

Plan all you want, without rain it's for naught! I will pray harder for rain during the growing season. Put so much work and effort into things this year, some cannot water, all dead now.

Lots of good ideas above, and I plan to implement a lot of them.

This year, as an experiment, I tried starting a pole bean early in a pot and setting it out in the beginning-to-vine stage instead of agonizing about whether the soil was warm enough to plant beans yet.

That one bean plant, a Fortex, grew mightily and we have had several messes of beans off of it. Our planted-in-ground pole beans have grown powerfully, but are just now blooming. Needless to say, I will be starting several pole beans early in pots next year.

MM

Every year it's the same..... the squash takes over! This year, I have one hill per variety of two plants of each, and they're still taking over. I don't want to plant fewer plants, and I don't have more room. Has anyone tried trellising summer squash and zucchini? what about acorns, delicata, and butternut? I'd imagine the vines aren't strong enough to support this type of growth.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Portia

Next year I will try to keep better tract of the varieties I am growing so I know where they are. This year, I thought I could remember, but, now I can't tell one cucumber variety from the other. I will put permanent markers on the rows next year. And I'll remember to take photos and document the different varieties.

I'm not going to move in the middle of growing season next year! I had so many starts indoors, but plans changed and I had nowhere to plant them as we were house-shopping. Our new house has a HUGE garden, and I can't wait until next year!!

For the Fall Season I plan to (and have begun to):

1. Buy more Earthboxes.
2. Try more varieties of tomatoes to grow inorder to determine which ones I truly like.
3. Invest in another light for seedling development.
4. Grow my own vegetables from seed as they seem to be healthier.
5. Carefully watch everything especially cucumbers & tomatoes for signs of diseases.
6. Try using Messenger to help ward off any diseases.
7. Start using a natural fungicide early on cukes, squash & tomatoes.
8. Maintain a detailed record of planting times, germination, flowering, fruiting, etc of all my food crop plants, and keep records of favourites so I know what to grow the next year. I always start doing this and then just gradually stop.
9. Learn more recipes for using my veggies rather than just giving them all away because I don't know what to do with them.
10. Stop getting freaked out over the bugs.
11. Give away some of the billion seeds I have but don't want.
12. Order more seeds that I really want.

For next year:

1. Make permanent beds and permanent paths in every garden not just the garden at my house.
2. Sow carrots, peas, beets, mesclun, and spinach right after the snow melts.
3. Breakdown and use commercial slug bait/killer...I just can't take it one more year.
4. Grow vine type cucumbers on trellises.
5. Have the guts to put out 10 "sacrificial" tomato plants early enough to potentially have them all killed from frost or hopefully produce very early tomatoes
6. Never ever grow mache again...couldn't stand the taste.
7. Stop hoarding so many seeds "just in case I can't find them next year".
8. Plant more zinnias and then have the gumption to pinch them to produce more flowers
9. Be more unselfish with the growlight space and give my wife more room for her peppers and flowers.
10 Grow even more perennials using WS methods.

(Sorry, I know I slipped in a few non-veggie entries.)

do i have to cut my zinnias? ;-)

i will keep a better journal
make more raised beds
switch from soaker hose to drip tape
plant more companion herbs
plant more corn
spray everything with aquanu & liquid seaweed regularly
have more space for starters, & more cold frames too!
if i have to fall, i will take my surgeon's advice "tuck & roll"!

tf

TF,

Why drip tape instead of soaker hose?

i will
1. make better markers so i know what type of tomatoes i am growing.
2. get out of the garden and plant every veggie into containers

frank

TF What is Aquanu?

Frank, why do you want to do containers? I have considered this myself, but haven't tried it yet.

Containers are the only way to go. I use wine barrels (20). Shooting for 30 or more. I also use cinder blocks two high and three wide and eight and one half feet long. Both the barrels and the cinder blocks hold the heat!! You can plant alot sooner because the soil warms up faster. There is hardly any weeding!! You can really crowd the the plants in as long as you have your soil amended. I get my barrels for 13 bucks apiece. Oh plus, we are renting and we can take them all with us.

danak - because i am tired of putting up a 7 ft. fence to keep out the deer. tired of constantly pulling weeds, i have tomatoes in containers on my deck and its much easier for me doing it this way. maybe i'm getting to old

stlhead - how do the concrete blocks work? do you just stack them up and then fill the area with container soil?? that really sounds like a great idea. let me know about this please.

Herbie,
Yes you stack them up two high and as long as you want and as wide as you want. You point it north and south so the bricks get warm on each side which in turn warms the soil. I also plant the square holes. Oh, make sure you put chicken wire down before you put the dirt in (MOLES)!!!
Richard

Lots of good advice here, including tuck and roll. Thanks TamaraFaye.

Aqua-Nu Products in Amarillo Texas can't find his website, never been there. did a search & none of them were it somewhere i have a pen with his contact info!

aqua-nu is a water treatment, a soil neutralizer, etc. somewhere! i have a brochure. i use the non-drinking one with added iron for my soil. it literally provides what the soil needs in order to work. the email guy is better at explaining it. i get mine from his place south of Amarillo. he ships worldwide, might even have distributors.

will get info soon.


here is the drip tape system
http://www.irrigro.com

tuck & roll!
tf

Weed more, mulch more, and find someone who will help me....this has been my same list for the last 12 years! lol

you're welcome to move here! i am still one-handed & wishing i had a helper, & less weeds & more mulch

Just about everything! The garden has done OK this summer in a lot of ways but despite my best efforts there is still a tremendous lack of annual flowers I try to plan for cutting.
Next year I only need to plant ONE cucumber seed. I just can't eat that many and it doesn't make sense using that much room to just throw them in the compost pile or donate them to a local fruit stand. My attempts at pickle making have made me a buyer of Bubbie's brand when I want a pickle or do without.
No more ordering exotic tomato plants from the Southwest, (Seeds of Change). These varieties haven't done that well here and although one or two have a good flavor, what I really wanted were large, very tasty, highly productive, disease resistant red tomatoes. ...not asking too much, am I?....well, I learned a lot.
Need to use a very heavy wheat straw mulch on the ENTIRE garden , not just the tomatoes. The crab grass is extremely thick and vigorous and, as usual, has gotten ahead of me and choked out several rows of planting. It's even made inroads into my blueberries.
Somehow I missed planting corn, melons, pumpkins and okra. That much less food for the racoons and japanese beetles I guess. I have planted some fall lettuce varieties; I hope they will sprout desite the heat.
None of my tomatoes has produced much, not even one canning yet, and they are beginning to succumb to the various blights, as always. Well, better luck next year. I hope this doesn't go down as the first summer I've had a garden that I wasn't able to can all the tomatoes and sauce I needed for the coming year.



This message was edited Aug 13, 2005 4:01 PM

Right, now my list is twice as long as it started out, thanks to everyone else's. But I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees room for improvement. :)

Portia,

"I don't want to plant fewer plants, and I don't have more room. Has anyone tried trellising summer squash and zucchini?"

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v608/MaineMan/squash_tower-1.jpg

I have grown summer squash in an over-sized tomato cage, with some success. I make my cages from concrete re-mesh wire. I refer to the structure as a "squash tower". Occasionally a squash vine gets outside the cage and you have to use some kind of plant tie to coax it up vertically. It has worked well enough that I am going to try the same thing again next year.

I also have ice box watermelons in big cages, which amount to cylindrical trellises for them. With a little training, they take to the wire nicely. Now I have a lot of melons hanging in the air and I think I may have to devise some supports for them. The jury is still out on that one for next year.

We're doing as much vertical gardening as we can to conserve space. We quit bush beans altogether and are growing pole beans.

MM

OH ZEP

I am seriously considering only ONE improvement
Irrigation. I got NOTHING from the garden. We went from
cold and dry in June. To hot and dry the rest of the summer. My birdbath only has been full once all summer. I planted in dust and dust it remains.

Trouble is I live in town and the water is clorinated and very expensive.

Does anyone have any success with drilling a well in town?

I was wondering where you went, roxroe. I remember things weren't going too well for you. That truly stinks.

I'll go ahead and speak highly of the drip irrigation system we installed. If there was no rain in a week, we'd water for an hour or two (depending on how dry things were) and it really didn't amount to much. Did it under the mulch (where I had mulch) early in the a.m. or late at night and lost almost nothing to evaporation. It's the way to go for those of us w/ expensive water.

Aren't there filters you can use to cut out some of that chlorine? Is it so chlorinated that other gardeners can't use it either? I suspect Winchester has some rules against in-town well drilling, but even if they don't, that is pretty costly. If the chlorine's really a problem, maybe you could look into a filter.

Sorry about your season, roxroe.

roxroe, Sorry about your garden. We've had an extremely wet summer, so I really wasn't aware that not too far northeast of here was suffering a drought. In the 90's I lived in the Atlanta metro area and had a conatiner garden circus (probably what the neighbors thought it was) going on in my driveway and I used chlorinated city water on them. They did quite well and didn't suffer any noticable negative effect. If you're serious about the well, you could contact your city officials and check on your local ordinances, though no doubt it could be an expensive project. On the other hand, you'd have good water for drinking and all your household needs. Maybe you will get some late summer rain and can get in a few fall crops. Good luck.

We have chlorinated water here and I never gave using it in the garden a second thought. It may be only slightly chlorinated though.

Same here - chlorinated water. I also have an irrigation meter installed at the house, which means I don't pay for the water treatment fees on that part of the bill (i.e. sewage treatment) so even though the irrigation meter cost a bit to get put in initially, my water bill is considerably less because I don't pay the treatment cost on that water, which is generally about half the amount of the water bill if you don't have it coming through an irrigation meter. It's a separate meter on the side of the house and they take separate readings from it.

I like the irrigation meter idea! I'll have to see if our water company can do something like that.

Roxroe, sorry your garden got crisped. Too bad there isn't some way to even out the rainfall across the country so we'd have less drought & less flooding in our gardens! (Now the critterologist in me has to pipe up and add that would greatly reduce the diversity of our ecosystems and be detrimental to the life cycles of many plants & animals, so if a genie pops out of a bottle and offers you a gardening wish, that might not be the one to choose after all...)

We put drip irrigation in our little home orchard and ran soaker hoses through most of our other beds. Most of the system is connected to a 6-valve programmable unit on the back of the house. I can change the program (or turn it off on rainy days like this) from inside my dining room... I love it! Water use is far less what it would be if we watered with sprays from a hose or a sprinkler, and the timer lets me do my watering at 5 am to further reduce evaporative loss.

next year. . . bigger, bigger, bigger.

Find as many ways to kill beatles as I possibly can.

Preamantis anyone?

Grub control this month.

Grow more types of squash. Could they be more fun to grow?

Irrigation system is going in.

Steps. Mine is on top of a steep berm. I hate the way I keep falling down, but the pumpkins don't seem to mind.

and I'm going to try some berries. Haven't done that yet.

-now if only I can make my husband understand the cost of these changes is worth it!

Fun thread!

Grow my curcubits up trellises. It works for beans, and I can use the same system I use for them.
Finish mulching with cardboard between the rows of my raised beds.
Religiously spray with either milk or baking soda at the first sign of powdery mildew.
Don't let my husband bully me into waiting until June to plant.
Finally put in the asparagus bed.
Take better care of my thornless raspberry patch.
leave some room for flowers in the vegetable garden.
Try corn again.
Give myself permission to NOT plant the space hoggers I don't much like, like brocoli, or that don't yield enough to make them worth it, like spinach and peas.

thanks for everyone's comments - I sure learned a lot
An Irrigation meter - never heard of such a thing
and a 6 valve programmable unit.

Still hasn't rained here. Lost the mums already. They say 'techincally" we aren't having a drought because the ground water is still high from previous years but us gardeners are suffering. Only persons I know who got tomatoes were people like me who moved to containers or lived by a creek so they could water directly from the creek. Sigh

Off to lowes to consider my choices. Considering some grub control - saw a few this year - not many - but more than last year.

I just got back from the central part of Washington. We are having an official draught. It's not as noticable in the west, but up there the rivers and reservoirs are SO LOW! It was amazing. Maybe it's time to get a rain barrel.

yes, will add a rain barrel next year!

We've waited a year in our new house to see what did what in the garden and will do a lot new for next year - I hope! You know how time gets away from you.

We are going to pull out all the stuff we don't like and is crowding out what we do like.

Put in some sort of irrigation (drip or soaker) so I don't have to spend hours hand watering.

Redesign the entire kitchen garden area as trees have grown and the orig garden is now partially shaded. Hopefully will be incorporating a chicken yard into that shaded area as I've always wanted to have chickens.

Mow mow mow down the blackberries.

Try some stuff in containers as suggested above.

Plant sooner! I always wait way too long.

Put more seeds directly into the ground instead of starting them in the greenhouse as some didn't seem to transplant well, probably because a lot of them were rootbound by the time I ventured to put them in the garden.

Plant closer! I got out my ruler and religiously measured this year according to package suggestions and most everything but the potatoes are too far apart.

Get composting underway and working instead of just throwing stuff into the bins and never doing anything with it.

Get ducks to see if it helps with the slug invasion. The house came with a duck pond and a duck house, so we might as well!

Gwendalou

I have decided to add to my next year's list, guineas, chckens, & turkeys! Maybe ducks too! And a chicken tractor!

OK, I am soooo slow. Found that ingo on Aqua-Nu, then couldn't find where I was supposed to post it LOL please, forgive me...

AQUA-NU PRODUCTS
6901 W. McCormick Rd.
Amarillo, Texas 79118
ph 806/622-2070
fax 806/622-1086

Been a couple years since I called or went in person, then spoke with his wife, real kind woman! Lately a friend in Amarillo just picks up mine when she picks up hers.

Hope this helps! I have used it without seaweed & got good results on plants. But have better soil afterwards when used WITH seaweed.

I think I should plant more kinds of peppers next year. My brother loves pickled peppers, and they make great Christmas gifts........nothing like doing your Christmas shopping right out in the back yard and having a good time too. Anything pickled (kosher dills, peppers, some kinds of relishes, carrots, beets, even zuchinni, are soooooo easy to to pickle, and a nice basket full of them and a block of fancy cheese and some crackers always hit it big as Christmas gifts. All the different colors and types of jars of pickled items look so pretty in a nice assortment.
My family always appreciates those kinds of things because they are somewhat "luxury items" on the grocery list, as they are not truly necessary and are so expensive. Even can make jalapeno jellies and pepper jellies that are kind of a rare treat.
Had a wonderful time in my garden this year, just hope the Lord is so gracious to allow me another one next year.

PeggieK