First Year Garden Update

Being I posted some late-surfacing Trinona "Time Trial" photos on Monday (and I'm planning to post more Trinona Triathlon photos this coming Monday), I figured I'd show some more old photos. Just over a year ago, we built a new garage. Here's a bunch of photos of garage-building the timeline from a year ago.

Just after spraining my ankle last April, we put in the final backfill along the back 2 sides of the garage:

Pitching dirt with Henry to haul home.


Final 2 sides of the garage re-graded (shot from my neighbor's yard).

Zoning code states that a new structure needs to be 3 feet from property lines, so we had 3 feet of "wasted space" back there where we decided to put in a small garden.

Then, on the weekend that Charlie was born in May, we had hoped to get some plants in the ground. Little Chuck had other plans. But this is what it looked like on May 10th on the far side of the garage:

Skinny raised beds (18" x 9' each), pavers, and re-graded yard
ready to be seeded. Those pavers go RIGHT up to the edge of our property line!

I posted some more pics in this post from mid-July, but many of these I haven't posted before:

May 16th: Tomatoes and peppers on top, and herbs and onions to the right.


View from the other side.


June 11.


June 16: Henry helping me water the herbs (with water from the new rain barrel in the background!).


June 25: Tall grass, GIANT tomatoes, nice sized basil, and zucchini spreading out at the lower right.


Some cherry tomatoes a few days later.


Picking some cherry tomatoes on July 3rd before visiting some family. (50 harvested at that point.)
And that's a zucchini on the upper right, LOTS of basil, and a ton of cucumber blossoms.

Here are 4 photos from July 11:

Overall shot.


Tomatoes went CRAZY.


Lots of basil and our zucchini.


Just before harvesting the first cucumber of the new garden in early July.

I didn't get a great photo of this, but a few weeks after taking those last photos, the biggest 2 tomato plants reached above the gutter, and then they flopped over on themselves. I need to be better about pruning them back this year. (I hear that leads to more fruit too.)

July 24th's harvest.


Aug 16th's harvest, which included a tomato nearly as big as Henry's waist.


Henry (pantless) helping me carry the rest of the Aug 16th's harvest into the house.


Aug 21.


Charlie with the the day's tomato harvest on August 24th.


Aug 26.

On Oct 19, we drained the rain barrel to get it ready for winter. The running water made Henry's "water" want to "run" as well:

Rain barrel draining, Henry peeing. This is my life.

Then on the 27th of October, we got the remaining veggies out of the garden before they froze:

Lots of green tomatoes, Charlie, Mama, and empty beds in the background.


The last fall harvest.


Two layers of green tomatoes in a box wrapped in newspaper. This is supposed
to help them ripen properly. It worked pretty good.

Sidenote: In mid-November, I took a photo of the tomatoes ripening outside in the fresh snow, which was posted on my Photo Blog:

[click the image to enlarge]

That photo ended up being used on "Things Organized Neatly" - one of my favorite tumblr sites. Sweet!

Here was our final harvest count for 2014:
- Cherry Tomatoes: 121
- "Bigger" Tomatoes: 113 (from a early variety plant and and heirloom plant)
- Zucchinis: 16
- Cucumbers: 35
- Purple Peppers: 4 (but 1 was TINY)
- Red Peppers: 4
- Green Peppers: 4
- Yellow Peppers: 2
- Onions: 20
- Too much basil!!
- Lots of random herbs

That's not bad for 18" of garden in "unusable" space, right? We're not going to do too much different this year. We had a wet June, so I think the peppers didn't do well because of that (we had lots of yellowing leaves that dropped off, and I think that's due to too much moisture), so we'll try them again before giving up on peppers. We don't need as much basil, and I don't think we need onions either. We'll maybe have room to do more cukes or maybe even another zucchini this year.

Oct 29, 2014: Henry (with his truck) by our emptied garden. Ready for winter.

I can't wait to see more green grass and lush plants like those photos above. This made me want spring back ASAP! (Again, here are more photos of our 2-story garage being built if you missed that.)