Things I have learned from my vegetable garden this year 2012

There are always lessons to learn from your garden successes and failures.  If you are not learning your garden is probably not growing. 

Corn

First thing I learned from the garden this year is my corn did really good by increasing the number of seeds I planted.  Corn is not fertilized by bees; the flowers are pollinated by the stocks blowing in the wind and pollen falling from the top of the stock to flowers below.  With all the success I did make a mistake I won’t repeat next year.  Next year I will plant my seeds in intervals rather than all at once.  Planting in two week intervals should spread the crop over a longer period of time.  I had to give away and throw too much of my crop into the compost because it came to ripeness faster than I could eat it. 

My tomatoes and cucumbers taught me another lesson this year.  Unlike my corn I did not have a good crop of tomatoes this year.  Last year I planted them in the garden bed where they quickly took over.  This year I thought I would contain them in pots which worked well, but my mistake was to place them against the house making it easy to hook them into the existing watering system.   All this worked well, until the heat of summer began to radiate off my house and bleach my tomatoes and cucumbers.  I will note my tomatoes handled this much better than the cucumbers.  Next year I will move my pots to the other end of the yard. 

Earth Worms

My greatest success may have come from the compost pile.  I have been experimenting with composting for many years, with less than ideal conditions plaguing my results.  Two years ago I built a compost tumbler that internet bloggers claimed could turn garden and vegetable waste into beautiful soil in two weeks.  I don’t know what they are doing to accomplish this but I sure am not having these results.  In fact my compost experiment hit a wall last year without any compost being produced.  I was about to give up on the whole thing when I took an interest in worm composting.  I read up on it, and even considered buying an expensive worm bin.  But me being me decided to buy some worms and just throw them into the compost tumbler to try.  Guess what it worked great, in fact I have a lot more worms today than when I started which means I am harvesting both compost and worms for my garden.  

So what do my worms like to eat?  I put everything that you would put into a normal compost pile into my worm composter.  I assume the worms really like old bread because it disappears quickly.  Shredded paper seems to be very popular.  Whenever I place it into the bin it goes quickly, and when I come across an un-composted ball of shredded paper it is filled with worms.  I have read that worms will double in number every 90 days, but I don’t know that for sure.  What I do know is that since adding them last year I have a lot more, and most of them are small baby ones.