Gardeners are risk takers.  They have to be.  Nothing is guaranteed with seeds and plants.  Even with the best care failures occur.  I tried several new things last year and had some successes and some failures, but as usually happens, what works outweighs what doesn’t.

Running two businesses keeps me short on time.  My garden is most always a weedy mess.  It’s gardening on the run.  I’m gone many weekends doing trade shows and while I do get relaxation in the garden, I don’t come close to putting in as much time as I would like to or as the garden really needs.  I garden for the food, but it’s also an experiment, or many experiments, and for me it’s a way to get to understand nature and some of the interactions that define ecology.

Several things went really well this year.  One was my trellised pea planting inter-cropped with lettuces.  My farmer friend Michael Ball had hundreds of volunteer lettuces sprouting from where he let his previous year’s crop go to seed.  So lettuce starts were free for the taking and I took lots, planting them around and between the peas, as well as in part of my garlic bed.  I’ve been inter-planting greens in my garlic for years.  It works great.

I thinned and transplanted corn with very good success.  Transplanting corn can be tricky. You have to get the whole tap root.  Too much root disturbance and the transplants will be stunted.  But the bed I transplanted ended up the equal of the directly seeded bed in terms of production and quality.

I had a decent tomato harvest considering that last year I lost most of my crop to late blight.  This year no blight, but since the garden was virtually un-worked in July and August because of the worst mosquito population Wisconsin has seen in years, the tomatoes were relatively untended.   No trellising or pruning and almost no weeding.  I had noticeably diminished yields but what came through came through healthy.  A lesson reinforced however:  the tomatoes like to be trellised and pruning the low lying branches helps a lot.

My squash harvest was the best ever, but I had bad luck with the melons I planted and we’ll have to work on them for next year.

I’ve expanded my indoor growing.  We’ve been eating salads of mixed greens and harvesting just about all the basil we can use from my LED light set up in the basement.

So as we move into the new year, I’ve learned that I have to take better care of my tomatoes, I want to do even more crop inter-planting, and  extending the season is going to be a primary aim.  I’ve built a cold frame to get a jump on getting some greens going outside in the spring.  The sweet potatoes in mason jars are already setting roots.  And it’s seed catalog ordering time.  Soon the onion seeds will go into flats followed by the rest,  and we’ll keep the cycle going in 2011.