The summer growing season in the garden is coming to an end. It’s a joyous season with lots of harvest. Tomatoes tumble off the vine and fruit trees burst with juicy treats.
While it’s not the time to prepare your garden for winter, it’s a great time to reflect on the season and consider what went well and what didn’t.
For me it’s the latter!
But like I said before, I’m surprisingly okay with all my gardening mistakes. I don’t lose motivation as much as I thought. In fact, it motivates me to try something new and do better for next year.
So today I want to share a visual tour of my garden and some of the things I plan to do differently or do more of next year.
read more:
June and July in my garden
may in my garden
April in my garden
procession in my garden
Sweet peas were abundant this year. I plan to dry these seeds and use them next year because they were the most gorgeous ones ever. I think the first seeds I bought were Thompson and Morgan, so I plan on buying more in case the dried ones don’t work as well.
Our cosmos are still beautiful as always. These grow in all seasons and are amazing for filling your garden with color. They are easy to grow and require very little care, so I hope to grow more of them next year.
My sunflowers have become really beautiful. I love having giant ones because I grow them next to the fence and they peek over the fence like a big welcoming smile. I also grew some small sunflowers, so I would like to grow more next year. I definitely need more because it’s great for cutting and lasts so long!
It’s so much fun watching the pumpkins grow. I don’t know what to do with the pumpkins next year. I love them and enjoy making soups with them, but they take up so much space. I planted all the pumpkins at the edge of the raised beds so they can walk on the grass, but the pumpkins have taken over and I can’t walk between the beds. I might try growing something next year….?
My outdoor tomatoes are great! It’s very delicious and sweet. It obviously takes longer to ripen outside, but it’s worth the wait. It seems like most gardeners have had trouble with tomato blight this year, but I was lucky and didn’t have any. Let’s hope the weather stays warm enough for all these green things to ripen!
My indoor tomatoes were doing well in the greenhouse, but each plant wasn’t producing as many tomatoes and they didn’t seem very healthy overall. They always looked a little sad and looked like they were about to die. I’m not sure what the problem was there. I thought my pots were too small, but when I visited Isa for the Grocery in the Garden experience, I discovered that her tomatoes were thriving in the tiny pots!
My peppers are growing well. I’m hoping some of them will be red, but honestly I can’t remember what kind of chili peppers I chose, so maybe just green?
White carrot! It’s a parsnip. They took over. It’s big. I didn’t expect it to be this big! If this goes well, next year I’ll be planting only parsnips. I’ve heard that parsnips are best harvested after the first frost, so I have a little more time.
How beautiful my dahlias are!
My green onions turned out fine, but they were buried in the parsnips so I had to pull them all out. We need to find something we can do now before it gets worse!
What I’ll be doing differently next year
Proper structure for growing runner beans
All zucchini outdoors – Potted zucchini didn’t work out so well. I plan on growing them in a greenhouse first and then leaving them in large pots for a while, but the zucchini in raised beds have definitely grown best.
Add more pots to your patio – My sunny patio was a great place to start a bunch of seedlings, but once they were all planted I wasn’t able to make the most of the space. We have a walled area that faces south so we need to put more pots and planters here so we can get some beautiful sunlight near our back door!
Improving Bathtub Drain Holes – I bought a lot of cheap bathtubs at home bargains. It actually looked great, but I was lazy and didn’t make a proper drainage hole, I just used scissors to do it. A lot of my tomato plants were looking a little soggy because of this, so I’m going to drill better holes in those tubs!
Plan recipes and ideas for preserving vegetables – It’s great to have hundreds of zucchini or buckets of parsnips, but when they all arrive in bulk at once, you don’t know what to do with them!