Taking stock

As I walk around the gardens in the fall, I try to tally up the successes and failures of the past season and pinpoint the reasons for the one or the other.   Corn, tomatoes and lettuce were great this year, the former two because of the dry, hot summer and the lettuce despite those conditions.  Onions, shallots, potatoes and fennel were big failures, due to poor germination on the onions and wrong variety/wrong conditions for the fennel, and some sort of blight (not the dreaded late) on the potatoes.  Most of the other crops were not so bad, but not great.  I think the extended dry, hot conditions were the culprit for most of the problems and there is not a lot I can do to solve that problem short of digging a pond... hmmm.  The other things  that can be done are planning ahead for better varieties, scheduling seeding more timely and finding organic solutions to blight and mildew problems.   There is still plenty of gardening left before the big freeze.  I am still planting spinach to winter over, composting old plantings and cleaning up around the homestead.   The 2013 seed catalogs will be here before you know it.