A Pretty Weird Year

September Writing Challenge - Prompt # 29:

Outside

We've been slowly retiring our garden boxes for the end of the season. Every week we pull a few plants and cut the water to a section of the garden. Each year we have some successes and some failures. 

Successes this year: 

Cucumbers

Tomatoes (celebrities)

Peppers

Sage

Basil

Potatoes

Onions

Carrots

Summer squash

Zinnias

Marigolds (yellow)

Failures this year:

Corn

Pumpkins

Melons

Cilantro

Marigolds (orange)

Tomatoes (romas)

After four years, we still have a mint problem. I pull it and spray it multiple times each year, and it just keeps coming back. It also pops up thirty feet away! It smells amazing, but I need it to die! We have accidentally been very successful at growing mint. 

This year we redid our strawberry box, so we didn't have a good strawberry crop, but next year we might! I can't really consider this a success or a failure. It's just something that needed to be done. 

The potato bugs continued to be a problem for the entire season. I eventually started using Diatomaceous Earth, and I think it helped, but in order for it to be effective, I probably need to sprinkle it on every-other day, and I only did it about every two weeks. 

Here are some photos of how our garden progressed. Only 3.5 garden boxes fit in the photo from this angle, but we have seven. 

May:

June:

July:

I would have loved to get a photo in August, but I went out there one day, and 75% of the garden was dead! So I said, "Well, I guess you're done. Thanks a lot, pal."

Now we have herbs, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, carrots, and onions remaining. Even though we are bad at growing corn, I usually at least get a few weak cornstalks to decorate with, but they all broke in half in the wind. There are also no pumpkins because they all ripened too early and rotted out before we even made it to September!

It was a pretty weird gardening year, but that seems to be true of every year. What can I say? I'm a pretty weird gardener.