Since the year is ending, I thought I'd sort of review my gardening year that is (mercifully!) ending today.
WINTER: Drought and Fire. Here in Love County, our drought that began months earlier in the summer of 2008 continued as our volunteer fire departments fought some massive wildfires that often required all 14 depts. in our county to respond, and sometimes other counties' fire depts. too. I choose my varieties and seeds to start based on a continuation of the drought. Some very warm winter days occurred after the fruit trees already had sustained enough chilling hours to set fruit, so the fruit trees were poised to bloom too early.
SPRING: I planted onions and potatoes on time and prepared my soil for tomato-planting time. As I was hardening off tomato and pepper plants in mid-spring, on a couple of occasions very hard winds began blowing while I was away at wildfires and the winds beat some of my seedlings to death. I lost all of a few varieties, but since I start a whole lot from seed every year, the world didn't end. The fruit trees bloomed too early and we eventually lost all the young fruit to several subsequent freezes or frosts.
Small amounts of rain that fell in March began to give me hope that we'd have a little drought relief. The perennial and reseeding annual flowers sprouted, grew and bloomed, although the blooms were a little later than usual.
In early April, much of Oklahoma faced devastating wildfires that burned thousands of acres and destroyed hundreds of homes. I left our home to go to fires in the early afternoon of, I think, the 9th of April, not knowing if our home would be standing when we returned. In a way, it was "business as usual" since we'd already been out a fires almost every day in the previous week. It was worse though, as the winds were in the 40s and 50. As it turned out, most of our county's fires that day were at the northern end of the county and we were OK at the southern end. The fire in Texas we feared would jump the Red River and get our houses stayed on its side of the river which was an enormous relief. By now, I was putting tomato plants in the ground and keeping a way eye on overnight lows. I covered up plants as needed to protect them from late freezes.
We attended the plant swap in late April, followed shortly thereafter by a 12.4" rainfall in one day here in Love County, a new record rainfall for one 24-hr-period for the state of Oklahoma. At this point, all the tomato plants, corn and onions stalled and stopped growing. I stopped planting. The entire month of May was torture. As if a foot of rain were not enough, another 7 or 8" fell in May. The garden remained too wet to plant for ages and the stalled plants didn't grow. The flowes were spectacular though, especially the dozens of Malva sylvestris "Zebrina", the poppies and the larkspur. Yarrow "Summer Berries" was gorgeous as were the zinnias that did great once they started blooming, but which were at least a month later than usual.
SUMMER: In early June, I finally got everything else in the ground and then the weather turned incredibly hot. Most of the near-drowned plants survived. However, we lost a lot of onions to drowning death and the potatoes either froze or drowned 3 times. I replanted potatoes the 4th time and said that I wouldn't plant again if anything happened to them. They survived. Weeding was a nightmare and I am assuming it was because of all the moisture. I struggled to stay ahead of the weeds while Tim mowed and weedeated every time it stopped raining and both of us fretted when heavy rains made it impossible to work outside. I had an unfortunate encounter with wildlife that scared me into staying indoors a lot.
July is when the garden really began producing vegetables in large numbers. From this point on, it was a battle to stay on top of the harvest. Because of ongoing rains, the flowers were huge and bloomed profusely. We began filling up the freezers and I started doing a lot of canning, freezing and dehydrating We bought another freezer. The purplehull pinkeye peas that replaced the broccoli (after I'd harvested the broc) began bearing heavily and we began to freeze a lot of them as well as eating them almost daily. The okra went bonkers. The tomatoes were awesome.
Continued wildlife predator issues in our neighborhood kept me inside more than I would have liked.
August brought us a lot of heat and little rain and I had to continue watering the veggies and flowers all month, having started watering them in late July when the rain stopped seemingly overnight. The harvest continued and I was canning, dehydrating and freezing food almost every day. At this point, we're eating 4 or 5 types of veggies daily from our own garden. It was heavenly. The first seed catalog arrived either in July or August from HPS and I immediately ordered Pink Brandymaster hoping it will be a good hybrid with Brandywine flavor.
AUTUMN: September stayed hot here in our county but a little rain finally began to fall. By now, I was cutting back a lot of flowering annuals that were a bit past their prime and looking tired. They rewarded us with abundant blooms. Most of the spring-planted veggies kept on producing and the fall veggies grew large enough to start producing. For once, we finally began to more or less catch up on the mowing and weedeating, but at the same time small weeds were starting to sprout in the garden pathways and I didn't do a very good of pulling those up.
I think it was in September that I found myself in "Pepper Heaven" (or H---) with 1600 peppers filling buckets and bowls and every square inch of counter space in the kitchen. Tim picked a great week to be out of town as I spent every day from sunrise until after sunset making pickled peppers, pepper jellies (over 60 jars of hot jellies alone), pepper rings, 5 or 6 different kinds of salsa, mixed pickled hot peppers, chipotles for the freezer, frozen chopped hot peppers for cooking, frozen whole jalapenos for later use in poppers, dried peppers crushed into pepper flakes and more dried pepeprs crused into powder. By the end of September I never wanted to see another pepper again, and yet they still kept coming.
October was a good month here. Some recurring coldish nights meant that the veggies had to be covered up occasionally to keep them from freezing. Some flowers, like zinnias, began showing mild freeze damage on flower petals and a few leaves. Other flowers, like Laura Bush pink and purple petunias and Texas Hummingbird Sage began blooming in veggie beds and garden paths, having reseeded themselves there from the plants still growing and blooming in the cottage border. The tree foliage began changing color and the leaves started falling. The harvest of cucumbers, sweet and hot peppers, winter squash, green beans, okra and tomatoes continued all month and I stayed busy putting up food for winter.
November was fairly dry here but we had a little rain. The harvest continued until the first frost arrived about mid-month. A few flowers held on through several frosts but they were mostly gone by the end of November, with the exception of Laura Bush petunias and some hot pink dianthus. I stayed busy with holiday preparatons and ordering seeds for next year. I did some garden clean-up but not as much as I'd hoped. The holidays always keep me busy.
December was a surprisingly cold month for Love County. We had nights, even very early in the month, in the teens and a string of days with high temps in the lower 40s that we thought never would end. I moved about 18 containers of plants into the garage: Cajun hibiscus, Angel's Trumpets, ornamental peppers and a few hot and sweet edible pepper plants. Two inches of snowfall surprised us early in December, followed later in the month by a Christmas Eve snowall of 7" that gave us our first White Christmas here in Marietta. More snow would fall a few days later. I continued ordering seeds and waited for the mud to dry up so I could work in the yard and garden. I'm still waiting and it is still raining and snowing. All the seeds I've ordered have arrived, except for a few back-ordered ones and I received a whole lot of seeds in the forum seed swap. We gave away about 180 jars of jellies, salsas, pickles and pickled peppers to friends as holiday gifts. I've planned my garden on paper and soon will start growing from seed indoors.
As the year ends, I have to say it has been a remarkable one both in terms of rainfall (about 53" here in Marietta compared to our annual average of 36") and the productivity of the garden. Although the mid-spring rains were hard on the cool season crops, we still harvested some onions and potatoes (less than usual, though) and lots of broccoli (usually it gets too early too soon here for us to get a big harvest). The summer and fall crops were very productive. The freezers and cellar were full of food we raised and preserved ourselves, and the lawn, pastures, trees, shrubs and flower beds benefitted greatly from the heavy rainfall. For a year that began with such dire drought and severe wildfires, it all turned out well in the end. The long sloping driveway that borders the southern edge of my garden has gradually washed away bit by bit in this year's heavier-than-usual rains. As soon as the river of mud formerly known as our driveway dries up, Elvis will come and replace the driveway base and gravel that has disappeared this year.
I made many new gardening friends (and kept the old ones too!) here at this forum and met some of them at the swap. It was, all in all, a winner of a year. I'm looking forward to 2010 when I'll be planting more veggies than ever before, and hopefully still will find time to have lots of flowers too.
That's a review of my gardening year in 2009. OK, y'all, it is your turn to tell us about yours.
Dawn
melissia
OklaMoni
Related Discussions
Photos and Review: 2009 Parkside Orchids Fest
Q
Want to Participate in a 2013 GWF Garden Tour; a "Year in Review"
Q
2009 ARS Roses in Review Survey
Q
Garden Ideas - Better Homes & Gardens Spring 2009
Q
tigerdawn
susanlynne48
southerngardenchick
elkwc
Okiedawn OK Zone 7Original Author
southerngardenchick
Okiedawn OK Zone 7Original Author
elkwc
Okiedawn OK Zone 7Original Author
susanlynne48
elkwc
Okiedawn OK Zone 7Original Author
susanlynne48
Okiedawn OK Zone 7Original Author