Lessons learned

Part of gardening is making mistakes and doing better.

My main lessons with vegetables this year:

1) Bunnies and green beans aren't a good pairing. Will try again next year with a double fence.

2) Bok choi and bugs--another problem pairing. If I want anything in the broccoli family at all, I'll have to spray with Neem Oil often. Or, and this is probably what I'll do, I can buy frozen bags of broccoli at the store instead. It's the only member of the family I outright love.

3) Stake! Tomatoes! More! This was a bizarrely good year for tomatoes here, but my plants were over seven feet tall at one point, and once the fruit begin to grow on stalks like that,  you'd better have a very sturdy trellis system that goes up that far. I'll probably use those metal fence posts and wire pig wire to them good and tight, and then tie the tomatoes up that.

4) Try to plant tomato plants two weeks apart so they don't all come in at once. More cherry tomatoes, fewer big tomatoes.

4) Despite the heat, my compost isn't composting very quickly. It rained twice a week here, but perhaps it needed even more water? I don't know, but the pile of grass clippings and vegetables still looks pretty much like a pile of grass clippings after three months. In the black container, out of the black container, all the same.

Questions still about vegetables:

- How much is enough garden space? I'm tripling next year and will be able to do spring and summer plantings if the weather cooperates.
- At what point will I need to buy a small chest freezer?
- Where can I get cheap soil and compost for a bigger raised bed?

I will plant more perennials with my sisters (they are both dividing their plants and donating to me) at the very end of September.This year, I just went with the things that were here, and only moved some roses. Next year, I'm sure to have some death and disaster among flowers, and more lessons to learn.