Last Ditch

Good morning and Happy New Year! As we throw ourselves into 2025, I wanted to do a little wrap up from the garden in 2024. Winter always feels like reflection and prep time, and since the weather is miserable, I’m going to stay warm inside today and tackle the reflection piece.

2024 was marked by weird weather. The growing season got off to a slow start and everything was 3-5 weeks behind of its usual growing. This meant that I wasn’t harvesting peppers, and considerably fewer of them, until late November. Luckily, we didn’t really have any real cold snaps until mid December so everything worked out in the end. But the year felt like a bit of a slow trudge uphill, with all the usual patterns and times thrown off.

In terms of yields, with the addition of another plot at a neighbour’s house, I had about the same yield as last year. YIELD NUMBERS go here.

Peppers

Peppers are the thing I most enjoy growing. It’s a long journey from seed to a ground spice that’s kitchen ready (8 months to be precise) but I enjoy the full cycle of creating my own spices. That said, the things peppers need most are sun and heat and those were in short supply this year until quite late. The peppers I did get were all great but my yields were about half of what they were last year.

Tomatoes

Even with the late start, the ‘purple bumblebee’ tomato variety I have been saving seeds from seemed unfussed with the cool weather and still produced about the same as I got last year. One thing of note, if you’re saving seeds of heavily hybridized, selected seeds, their most brilliant colours will fade with each successive crop, especially if they are open pollinated. My surprise hit of the summer were a variety called ‘gartenperle’ that my parents brought me back from Italy in 2012. The plant produced exactly 3 big juicy delicious tomatoes- I’m excited to try it again this year!

Corn

Having extra gardening space at my neighbor’s plot this year meant that I could experiment with a few things with more space. By far the most successful of these experiments was the rows of corn. I definitely could have had some better soil and supports so the plants didn’t flop over in the wind quite so much but it was a real treat to bring a bunch of succulent cobs to Thanksgiving dinner this year that I grew myself. But corn is a lot of work for something that’s already pretty cheap at most farmer’s markets. It’s fun if you’ve got the space but I don’t think it’s something I would invest much time to in the future.

Looking Ahead to 2025

It was a bit of an off gardening year for me, not just because of the weather. 2024 brought its own challenges and distractions so I’m refocusing on doing fewer things but better in 2025. I have lots of seeds to choose from and I’d like to continue to hone in successive planting and crop planning to really maximize my very small growing space.

What are your food growing goals for 2025?