We are also vegetable gardening in Zone 4, which has it's challenges, so maybe this blog will be helpful to others with a short growing season and a penchant for feeding their families from their small backyard gardens.
First, a recap of 2009:
Our first crop from all those new raised beds totally made up for all the work that went into building them. We harvested over 1,000 lbs of vegetables from our small plot. And we didn't even start to measure our harvest until September 6th. Yes, you read that right! Our fall harvest was over 1,000 lbs (at which point we stopped measuring). My husband wasn't convinced that we should spend much money and effort on the garden - lumber for the beds, seeds, soil additives, etc. So not only did I find much of that for free on Craigslist, we decided to take a serious look at the finances to see if it pays off. Suffice it to say... It does. In a big, big way. I knew that going in but my hubby wanted proof that all this hard work was worth it. I don't blame him - gardening isn't his passion and for much of the year it just seems like hard work. But after that demonstration of return on investment, he's totally in.
The crops that stand out from 2009 are: tomatoes (oh my god, the tomatoes!), peppers (beautiful!), squash (wonderfully flavorful), and melons. The melons are a stand out because they took up so much room and weren't that flavorful. They were good... but they all ripen approximately at the same time, I don't think it gets warm enough to really make them super sweet, and we came to the conclusion that it didn't make much sense for us to plant them again. DH wasn't crazy about the squash either, so we skipped the vines altogether for 2010.
Totally cool fact from 2009: We grew long-keeper tomatoes and stored them downstairs. We ate our last fresh tomato in February 2010. And it still tasted great! Yes, we threw many away that had rotted during the October - February months, but I still liked having "keeper" tomatoes to use throughout the winter. Totally cool.
And 2010:
We had plans to increase the size of our garden again in 2010, but we never had time to do it. So using the same square footage (aside from the melon/squash patch), we planted much of the same thing, except less tomatoes and more peppers. The stand-outs from 2010 are: tomatoes (explained a bit later), carrots (HUGE - I finally had the heart to ruthlessly thin them and Wow, what a huge difference! Big, but still tasted amazing), zucchini (they got really big without much care).
We basically neglected the garden in 2010 except for planting. We didn't weed, especially in the spring, and we were overrun with weeds all year. However, we still had a huge yield for the year and we were never without the veggies that we wanted. One cool thing that happened because we didn't weed: we had over 40 tomato plants sprout all over the garden! I gave some away, kept a few where they grew, and pulled up and composted the rest. All in all, it was a really fun experiment, but I wouldn't do it again because 1) the garden was really messy because of all the random plant placings, and most importantly 2) our Minnesota summers are too short to really get a good harvest from naturally sprouting tomato seeds. They just didn't have time to mature. Indoor seeding is still the way to go. This year I'll pull any that I see, and just use the ones that I've already started downstairs under lights.
So last year I learned that once you get the plants established, you can do very little weeding and still get a ton of vegetables. However, it was a huge mess and we had more problems with insects and pests than in years past. I will definitely weed this year.
We have also learned over the past couple of years that the biggest work load comes in the early spring (with building new beds and seeding/planting) and fall (with the harvest and clean-up). Throughout the summer, we just water, weed a little bit, and harvest. Pretty simple.
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