Gardening Journal: about plants (mostly just for my future reference)

 What I planted in my silly garden this year:
Six rows Green Beans; purple and bush
Four Cucumber plants; one pickling, one sweet, and two armenians
Three beds Turnips
Five rows Beets
One row Cauliflower
One bed Dill
Three rows Bok CHoi
Two rows Bloomsdale Spinach 
Four rows Broccoli
One row Cilantro

Three rows Swiss chard

Two rows Mixed Lettuce, plus one at the end of the garden path
Nine Tomato plants, assorted
Row of Arugula and Collard Greens

What did I learn about each vegetable and the way I planted it:
Green beans need way more water than I was able to use this year, they don't do well at all if they are under-watered. They need to be planted closer together than the six inches I aimed for this year, so next time I will err to the side of four.

Cucumber hills with surrounding trench

I've decided that hills and trenches are the best way to plant Cukes, and next time I'll try to plant more plants further apart. My Sweet Cucumber produced the first, and has produced fairly steadily over the Summer, with my Pickling Cucumber in close second. I got but one Armenian Cucumber from one plant, whilst the other plant, the one at the very end of the grouping, has been growing tiny leaves and vines and flowers like crazy to no avail.
I don't like planting Turnips in beds, they're too hard to weed and thin that way. However, my friend said that if you plant them in soft, loose soil, they'll move over on their own and you can just thin as much as you want to eat at a time.
Beets, my friend, do not enjoy shade, though they enjoyed it a bit more than my poor turnips did. Also, you can never plant too many. That was what I was trying to do, plant too many as we have chickens who would happily eat any my family couldn't.
My Cauliflowers were pretty weird this year, only three came up and they're still no more than six inches high, nowhere near the size they need to be in order to come to a head. I've decided they too do not enjoy shade, and they need more water. I think next time I'll plant them in either trenches or holes.
Dill is a weed. This isn't something I learned from my own garden, however, but something I've learned from the family garden in the back yard. I don't think it's really worth planting, it's more of a weedy-annual, something to let loose in your garden to provide more harvest with less work.
Bok Choi has to be planted really early, as it will shoot up and go to seed really really fast. It was pretty good anyway, though, and I'm not opposed to planting it again.
I planted Bloomsdale Spinach way too late in the season, bad idea. It shot up even faster than the Bok Choi did, so I ended up just pulling it all up before it blew seed all over my borrowed garden plot.
Broccoli is annoying as heck to thin because you can't just yank those poor little plants out of the ground and throw them away, because, you know, you could transplant them. And it'd be a shame to disregard and waste that lovely little talent, and anyway, you could share them with your mom! Except you never do... They fared better than the Cauliflower growth-rate wise, though.
My Cilantro also went to seed amazingly fast. It's definitely something you have to keep an eye on, not really suitable for long-distance gardening. Mum says it's better planted in a pot anyway.
Swiss Chard was one of the things I really wanted to plant, specifically, the rainbow variety. However, I wasn't ever able to get ahold of seed, so I settled for a variety I found at the hardware store. It's done really well, albeit a little parched and wilted over the hottest months, so the rows a a bit stunted in places, but all in all, I really loved how well it did and I'm enjoying harvesting it.
I adore Lettuce, especially the awesome mix my mom gave me. The two rows I planted in the shade did and are doing really well, but in contrast, the lettuce I planted at the very end of my garden matured after an inexorable amount of time, looking absolutely beautiful one day, then shot up the next day I went down to my garden. So today I pulled what was left up, because I was able to harvest most of it. Also, lettuce requires a nice amount of water, but that's a given, leafy greens and all that...
I actually was going to have my sister plant my Tomatoes for me, and she did most of the holes, but she wasn't impressed with the soil, so I ended digging the rest of the wholes and planting the tomatoes. It's been interesting growing them, as I've never really had that responsibility before. I can't say I've done the best job, most of the poor things are flopped over on the ground because I didn't get around to building more cages, and I lost like three of the plants for reasons unbeknownst to me. I knocked one more over with a hose too, but it hadn't broken off completely, so I propped it up and built a mount of dirt around it for support and in the hope that it might grow more roots above the break. It was doing great for the longest time, but a month ago it started dying, drooping over and shriveling up, which it too bad because I was really excited that I might have saved it.






The Arugula and Collard Greens experiment failed, end of story. Maybe I'll tell you more later...



















That's it for everything I managed to plant, hopefully all of this will help me to figure out how to do things better next year. For one thing, I'd really like to integrate more permaculture into my gardening in the future, that was supposed to be part of the point for this Summer's whole experiment.
Things work out the way they do, though, and everything always turns out just right.