What's Growing in the Garden - Late Summer Edition

We posted an early spring edition about the garden, but have not updated since. We are now at the end of our growing season. We had a variety of plants in the garden, some of which did well, others which did not. We will just hit a few of the highlights below: Here is our 2024 garden update.

Garden History

Over the past three years, we have struggled getting our plants to grow vigorously. We think the problem is a combination of soil issues (even though we got soil specially made for raised beds) and the amount of shade we have on the property. We have been working on soil amendment and have seen incremental improvements in the garden each year, which has been very encouraging.

Ground Cherries

We had one plant produce fruits. It was just enough to have a taste every few days towards the end of summer. Four other plants grew taller and fuller than the one in the photo below, but none of them produced any fruit.

Ground Cherries with Carrots in the Background

Tomatoes

It has been a struggle to get our tomato plants to grow big and produce here. This year was definitely the best year we have had so far. The weather fluctuations haven't helped, but we finally got numerous ripe tomatoes that we were able to harvest. I was so excited!

The Tomato Patch

Garden Huckleberries

This was our new-to-us experimental plant this year. The season for them seemed long, so I planted them inside in early spring. We had a difficult time getting any of the seeds to sprout. I ended up planting seeds twice indoors. We are still unsure what the trick is to getting them to sprout, but there were two plants that came up very late. I went ahead and stuck them in the garden. To be honest, they were in a pot that I didn't think had anything in it. When they finally sprouted, I thought they were pepper plants. You can imagine my confusion when I saw round fruits growing on the plants late this summer. I finally realized these were garden huckleberry and not peppers. I am still wondering what happened to my pepper plants...

The "berries" are much larger than I anticipated. It is rather late in the season, but if the weather holds, the garden huckleberries that are already turning purple might just make it to full maturity so that we can taste them!

Garden Huckleberries

Strawberries

We purchased two everbearing strawberry plants last year that got eaten to the ground by the deer over the winter. I wasn't sure they survived, but they came back and have produced berries throughout the summer. We also had a number of June bearing plants given to us by a friend early this spring. We didn't expect them to produce this first year, but they did, which was a nice surprise! We were excited to have strawberries to snack on. We have a number of runners growing and are planning to plant them and turn the entire bed into a strawberry patch for next year.

The Strawberry Patch

Squash

We never had trouble growing squash at any of the places we lived until now. We are still trying to figure out why squash doesn't grow well here versus everywhere else. We start the plants inside to extend the growing season, but they just don't do much and when they do, it happens very late in the season. One of our daughters who has a garden has been having the same difficulties and they live on the prairie, which has the best growing season in the area. We did see a bit of an improvement this year - we have a few tiny squash that are growing on both the summer and winter squash plants. Sadly, it is so late in the season that we will not likely get to harvest squash.

One of Our Squash Plants
(I am counting it as a win since this is progress over previous years.)

Corn

I knew planting corn on our shady property was not be the best idea, but I was really curious to see if it would grow. Well, it did grow, but the plants are so short - kinda cute, but oh, so short! We unexpectedly have ears growing on several of our rather stunted stalks. The corn bed is really fascinating. While we applied fertilizer and minerals to both sides this year, you can clearly see where the green beans and potatoes were last year. The half where the green beans were has much taller stalks. It is a great illustration of why crop rotation can be so helpful. 

Mint

We have orange mint in the large garden bed. I know most people don't plant mint in their beds because it spreads so prolifically. Nonetheless, we enjoy mint tea year round and it is one of the plants that has been growing well for us, so I trim it back when needed and otherwise let it go and enjoy the bounty! I have been particularly grateful that this plant grows so well since orange mint is one of my favorites.

Flowers

Our flower bed is an odd mix of plants. We have irises, bleeding heart, and day lily that were here when we arrived. We added lady's mantle, lavender, some kind of ground cover our cousin brought over, and a few random flowers that were on clearance at Wal-Mart. Last year, we planted a flower mix that I allowed to go to seed. This year I didn't really plant anything. I just waited to see what would come up from what had re-seeded last year. I tend to leave plantain and dandelion since we use those and it is much easier to forage them out of the flower bed than to scour the hillside for them. Thus, our flower bed is more of a wild random assortment than a beautifully planned garden. 

A Flower Amongst the Pine Needles

Other Plants We Grew:

Potatoes - These did well.

Borage - This grows really well each year and reseeds itself all over the garden.

Tarragon - We successfully propagated more plants.

Comfrey - We successfully split our plant and now have two healthy ones!

Carrots - We finally grew carrots here, but the size is nothing like when we lived in other areas.

Onion - These grew, but not well.

Peas - Our plants were short, but produced well for their size.

Garlic - They were not enormous, but almost all those we planted survived. We ended up with several heads.

Calendula - We had much better success this year with calendula! We were able to dry some for tea.

Pepper - Unlike last year, these did not do well.

Beets - The ants stole all but one seed.

Swiss Chard - We harvested a bit, but it didn't really thrive.

Lettuce - These grew way better this year than the previous years! We actually ate this with several meals.

Cabbage - We had a small head start, which is more than the previous years at this location.