End of Summer Garden Update

How about an end of summer vegetable garden update? Jack will be your tour guide.
Uh, never mind, apparently his tennis ball is more important.
Anyway, the garden did pretty well this year. Especially considering that we’ve been in a drought most of the summer.

Hands down, the award for most producing plant goes to the cherry tomato. Second place goes to the Roma tomato. And third place goes to basil. These puppies definitely produced. Our banana pepper plant did really well too.


Garden failures for this year are cucumber and bell pepper. The cucumber plant produced a fair amount of cucumbers, but they were very light in color from the moment they appeared on the plant. I read online that it may have to do with the soil. This is the second year they’ve come in like this so we’ve decided to stop growing them. Especially because the cucumber plant is a space hog, taking up nearly one third of the garden.


We still need to harvest our green onions. I want to try the chop them up, put them in jars, and throw them in the freezer method. Anyone use this method? Does it work?
In other news, the hens and chicks my mom gave me back in June are growing beautifully.

I’ve completely ignored them. Evidently that’s the key to growing succulents.


Since I didn’t kill these, I asked my mom to bring me more when she and my step-dad visit this weekend. I’m going to attempt to grow some indoors. Fingers crossed.


Did you have a vegetable garden this year? How’d it do?
Have you grown succulents? Were you successful?

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13 Comments

  1. I just bought some hens and chicks on clearance at Walmart! Do you know if they do well inside? I’m terrified I’m going to kill them (along with every other plant I’ve ever had!)

  2. We had almost the exact opposite results in our garden. The tomatoes have produced a total of one this year (though I think I spied some greenies on two of the plants), and we’ve had a lot of cucumbers (though most were fairly light in color). Our banana pepper and pinot noir pepper have done ok, but nada from the bell pepper. My basil and three types of mint have exploded, but the dill and cilantro both withered and died. My cucumber, squash and pumpkins have gone absolutely insane and are taking over their areas so next year we’ll have to double the size of the garden! Geesh!

  3. Our cherries were the best producer too, the large tomatoes all got eaten by bugs. Now that the weather has cooled, the tomatoes have exploded. Beans, peas, peppers were crap. Melons were few, but delish. Our usual over-abundence of zucchini didn’t even happen, but we’ve had a manageable harvest. Our cucumbers were crap, I had a few, but the all tasted bitter. We made this

    http://mollied.blogspot.com/2012/06/cucumber-trellis-thing-y.html

    for our cucumbers, saved a lot of space. Works for any viney plant.

  4. Super impressed w your green thumb. Those succulents are so gorgeous. I need to try my hand at those. I’m bummed about your cucumbers – those are one of my favs. Bravo on the garden lady, bravo.

  5. I tried chopping up my green onions and freezing them. At first they were great, but I soon realized it was the top layer that was great and the rest took on a freezer taste and looked sort of sad. Maybe if you try spreading them out in a single layer before freezing they may turn out better.

  6. I don’t have a vegetable garden because I don’t eat vegetables. Sick.

    Your succulents, however, are looking mighty pretty.

  7. We only had tomato plants this year, but they went NUTS! Especially the cherry tomatoes. AND don’t give up on your cukes! Call your local extension office; a soil test is like $10-15 (they’ll come out & take a sample), and they can tell you what your soil lacks and how to fix it to get your cucumbers to grow!

  8. Hehehe… Look how cute Jack is!

    We weren’t in the house in time to start a garden this year, but thankfully we have very generous neighbors!

  9. For the first time ever (in 3 yrs of having a garden) we had great success with romas and peppers (we did 3 bell types and jalapenos–which are super easy to do). One thing we do with our cucumbers (and this year we didn’t get as many as usual) is grow them up a trellis! They latch onto it and the fence behind the garden and spread out like crazy.
    One thing I think contributed towards our success is we tried different plants than normal. Usually we get all our stock from Home Depot but this year we got most of our tomato and pepper plants from the farmer’s market and they did great!
    Herbs are great-we always do basil and rosemary.

  10. With your succulents…………do you water them and how often? I just bought one and I am terrible at growing things. My mother in law has some of them and NEVER waters them but at the Farmers Market, where I bought it, the guy said to water once or twice a week!?!? What to do?

  11. You don’t need mom to bring you more… soon as you see a new chic pull it out.. it will have one straight root. Re-pot… watch it spread like wildfire…

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