I think at the beginning of the spring, I promised to be better about giving garden updates, but that didn’t happen, did it? I guess my problem is that I take pictures of the garden when something exciting happens, and then by the time I get around to editing the photos a few days later, everything seems out of date because the garden has changed again.

I guess gardening entries aren’t really something you can write ahead of time and schedule to post 2 weeks in advance, either. So I’m going to have to get better about immediacy of posting next gardening season.

Our garden went through so many iterations of life and death… It had a slow start, with our peas and beans dealing with aphids. Then, everything was bushy and green but not producing much. Our zucchini was giving us root-rotted veggies, and so were our tomatoes. We got some calcium pills at GNC and crushed them up to add to the soil, and the root rot was cured!

We had a short period of enjoying lots of yellow squash before that plant died of unknown cause. We pulled it up, along with our beans which we never seemed to harvest on time. We got a few random peppers that seemed to take forever to get big enough to pick…

Then we were getting ready to move and neglected our garden. We let things die, and only watered every 3-4 days. Everything looked shriveled and brown. But during a garage sale we had, I trimmed away all the dead parts and discovered that we had some extremely healthy plants underneath… our tomatoes started fruiting like crazy, and we have enjoyed tons of bell peppers since then.

We only got a couple honeydews and watermelons the whole season, but the ones we got were really juicy and flavorful. We might try growing them again, but not necessarily in the boxes. We might let them sprawl a little, like they’re designed to do.

Now that we’re moving on the 15th, the garden boxes have been emptied, the soil and our compost packed into big rubbermaid bins, the trellises removed, and the poor thriving plants had to be pulled up (we cut them up and mixed them into the compost though – so it’s not a total waste).

I wonder what you can grow in the central valley of California during the fall/winter seasons. I did find this month-by-month calendar of garden chores for the central valley, which looks helpful.

In any case, I’ll try to be better about updating the garden section once we get to California!