The 2021 Vegetable Garden

Now that autumn has begun in earnest, it is time for me to reflect back on this year’s vegetable garden. It was an unusual summer. We had tremendous amounts of rain throughout the summer. My recent experience is that July and August are drier. Last year we needed to water the garden every day. This year, we hardly watered at all. We had remnants of two hurricanes and many storms blew through our area. The resulting moisture was beneficial for some plants and detrimental to others.

One of the exciting producers this year were candy sized tomatoes. These scraggly plants yielded hundreds of tiny tomatoes. They were delicious! We put them on salads, folded them in omelettes, sprinkled them on pasta and snacked on them like candy. We gave them to friends and neighbors, who were surprised at the small size and the taste.

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In stark contrast to the candy tomatoes, our heirloom tomatoes and our Roma tomatoes did not produce well. What we harvested tasted good, but the quantity was minimal. The number of cloudy days definitely had an influence on how the tomatoes grew and ripened.

I planted black tomatoes. The size is similar to a cherry tomato. They had a rich flavor and produced well, in spite of the lack of sun. I am still harvesting them this week. I will definitely plant black tomatoes again.

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Andrew likes spicy food, so I planted two different types of chilis. The Thai chilis were supposed to be super hot, they were not, even I could include them in a dish. The green chilis were planted later. They were quite small. I tried to put them in some fried rice. I had a bite about the size of an 1/8 inch square and thought my mouth was on fire, my eyes watered and I began sweating. Even this tiny amount was too much for me. Andrew loves them!

We had many other things that grew well in the garden, including sage, chives, climbing spinach, butternut squash, basil, and rosemary. It was wonderful to cook lunch or dinner with vegetables from the garden. I still have these tiny butternut squash to harvest. I saved the seeds from a plant last year that produced small squashes. The size is perfect for making a meal for one.

I planted six rhubarb plants last year. Two survived and they were huge. I did not harvest much from them, in order to give them a chance to grow. The biggest plant died back at the beginning of September. It seemed early, so I am not sure it will return. I have planted three more. Perhaps next year I can begin harvesting more stalks. I did cut a few stalks. The leaves were heavy and the stalks were breaking on their own. I made a strawberry, rhubarb crisp for our neighbors. Reports were that it tasted good.

Carrots provided a fun vegetable. I planted red, orange, and purple carrots. None of them developed into the size of the carrots one finds at the grocery store. Still, the taste was excellent – rich and flavorful. The carrots in the picture were used to make a carrot cake we served to some friends. The different colors were noticeable in the cake and the flavor was scrumptious.

I have not had good luck with watermelon, any year. We had one delicious watermelon, so it wasn’t a complete disappointment. In this same vein, I had a single cucumber, one or two green peppers, as well as a few white and purple eggplants. Nothing like my bounty last year. There were several vegetables I planted that did not yield anything and even the plants died early. In this category were: cantaloupe, summer squash and zucchini. Usually zucchini grows like crazy and I cannot find enough uses for them.

In retrospect it was not a bad year for the vegetable garden. It was just an unpredictable year. Initially, I thought I had done something wrong. Who can’t grow a zucchini? Last week, I spoke with an avid gardener, Virginia. I met Virginia through the food pantry at church. She delivers fresh produce each Tuesday from a local garden that is run by volunteers to provide food for the community. We compared notes and she had similar results.

This year my thumb was green as much as it was red. Tomatoes being my most prolific crop. It was fascinating to start the tomatoes from seed indoor. Nearly everything this year was started from seeds. Every time I go to the grocery store, I look at the produce and think – “mine taste better than anything here.”

What was your garden experience this year?