Looking back on 2014

On this last day of the year, I look back and remember all the changes we had this past year. Some of our goals were not met, which are top priority for the coming year. New oil tank and new windows on our mobile home. Much needed to help keep us warm in the very cold winters here in NH.

We had a few failures in the garden as well. Garden peas and potatoes failed for the second year in a row. No idea what is going on with the potatoes, but grubs and slugs kept eating all the pea plants. Not going to attempt to grow either this coming year. I'll buy them at the farm down the street from me. Maybe I can ask them how they grow their potatoes and peas.

Corn was another failure too. We tried a new kind (to us anyway), Golden Bantam, but it was a bad experience. The stalks didn't grow very high, maybe about 5 feet tall for a couple. No matter how much I added to the soil to help them, it didn't seem to make a difference. I also only saw like maybe 8 ears of corn, which were small and didn't really produce kernels. I gave them to the squirrels to eat, which made them very happy.

Finally, garlic was our last failure. Planted a ton of cloves in the fall, enough for both me and my sister to share. We both use a ton of garlic in our cooking. It grew okay, or so I thought. I read all I could on how the garlic should grow and when to harvest it. So when the time to harvest it came, I followed all the instructions on howto cure it and such. I still ended up with small bulbs and hardly any of the cloves grew. Oh well. I am trying again this year with some Elephant garlic. I have two cloves (it is all that I got for 10.00! Kinda upset about that one) all planted and covered in plenty of straw to keep them warm.

Goodness, let's not forget how the grass and weeds overtook the garden. I wasn't the only one that had this issue. Figures, the one year I decided to not mulch the whole garden in straw. Not making that mistake next year. Going to cover the garden in nice thick layers and make the pathways with cardboard to keep the weeds away from the paths.

We did have a lot of thriving crops as well. As usual our snap peas and beans went nuts. We had our first couple of strawberries. They were soo sweet and so much better than the ones I get at the farm up the street. But because I had just planted them that spring, not many berries grew. Dad told me to snip all the flowers off so the plants could focus on growing. I didn't listen. The plants went bonkers growing anyway. The squirrels and birds planted pumpkins for us that produced 5 pumpkins.

I can't wait till next year. We have so many plans and goals for the new year. Have a few new seeds to try out in the garden. Plans to expand the garden (again) but only a little bit. For flowers, not veggies though, to bring in some bees, butterflies and humming birds to the garden.

Hope you all had a good 2014.