Our Urban Food Garden - 2014 | Page 7 | Food Production and Preservation | Forums

The middle bed in front is doing well. The cilantro and dill seem very happy. Our peppers did not to well this year again so we had to buy seedlings. The leeks are thickening up, and something ate a lot of our red onions!

We have about eight little peppers on the go!

The new bed in front just started to take off in the last week. The cucumber, zucchini, and watermelon are doing alright, while the spaghetti squash is absolutely massive!

One of our first two squash flowers, both are female unfortunately.

And try two of our watermelon experiment seems to be going better.

Was a pretty good year.  Garden did not get a ton of love once it was rolling as I was working a lot this summer.  I did not take a lot of pics this year, which I regret as I always love having a reminder of just how awesome the garden is.  Here is a dump of a few harvest pics from my phone.

Our watermelon and squash got hit pretty hard by squirrels.  I fashioned some cages to put over each fruit/veg but they still dug their little paws in there and damaged the skin.  You can especially see this on the watermelon up above.  I will have to find a better solution for next year. 

We have planted hot peppers but not had much luck in having them actually be hot.  We managed to grow a single incredibly hot pepper this year.  Trouble was we did not think any would be hot so we ended up using a few smaller ones on our pizza one night and it made it almost inedible, without knowing which one was the hot one it was hard to pull the appropriate peppers off.  Was funny and satisfying all at once.  Other peppers did awesome this year as well. 

We have around 16 medium sized freezer bags of tomatoes in the deep freeze for soups and stews over the winter, most of them are roma as they did really well this year.   Our heritage tomatoes did not do so hot, they would rot on the vine quiet easily so we probably lost 75% of our production.  We will likely not plant them again.  

By final harvest we had around 10 spaghetti squash stored, and considering we ate them through the summer as well I think we did pretty good. 

The kale and chard bed was looking good until about a week ago when the cold set in.  Now aside from a single rosemary plant and the garlic underground the garden is closed up.

We let our garlic stay in too long, so at harvest the outer wrapping was gone.  We used some but mostly I replanted them a few weeks back (about 110 cloves) so we are on to 2015 already! 

We continued to have great response from random people that walk by.  One older couple was walking by one morning and told me that our garden as pretty much the best use of a lawn he could think of.  Another lady stopped by and chatted for almost an hour with my girlfriend over the garden one morning.

Stronger bodies, stronger minds, and stronger communities.  I can't see a downside.