In 2018, we grew 63kg of food, up slightly from 54kg in 2017. Considering that gaining access to the garden plot in town more than doubled our available growing space AND gave us access to a polytunnel, that seems a bit depressing at first glance, but if we include qualitative as well as quantitative criteria, the result is not as grim as it could be.
First and foremost, the quality of vegetables that we grew was significantly better. If I'm being entirely honest, we ate a lot of really dodgy veg in 2017. We spent a lot of time cutting out chunks of potatoes where slugs had bored deep holes through them. We ate carrots and radishes that had bolted and gotten woody. We trimmed off bits of kale that had been massacred by caterpillars, leaving only the tough ribs behind. We spent lots of time cleaning the insides of ribs of celery where slugs had hollowed them out. In 2018, we still did some trimming, but in general, if something wasn't at least equal in quality to what we would expect to find at a farmer's market, we didn't weigh it.
Then, there was the distribution of crops. In 2017, we planted a lot of greens. Too many greens, honestly. If you add together the chard, beet greens, spinach, kale, and bok choi, we grew 21.6kg of greens in 2017. I like greens, but that's a LOT of greens. And in the height of summer, we were harvesting a kilo or more every week. Some of it spoiled, some of it got frozen, some of it got pickled. This year, we ended up with fewer greens and more of the stuff that I consider high-value, either because it costs more at the grocery store (figs, chili peppers), is significantly better when eaten fresh from the plant (tomatoes, cucumbers), or because it's difficult to buy in the UK at any price (tomatillos, daikon, mizuna).
Finally, we actually grew noticeably more than we harvested. Steve and I both had a particularly difficult time with depression this year, resulting in some weeks where we just couldn't face harvesting and cooking from scratch, so there was a lot of food that just stayed in the garden and fed the ecosystem. In particular, we could probably have harvested 3-4 times as much celery as we did. It's still going strong in early January. (Incidentally, if anybody has any good recipes that call for lots of celery, please send them our way.) I suspect we could have brought our total up to 70kg if we'd actually had the energy to weigh and process it all.
That isn't to say that there weren't some disappointments.
We had bad attacks of rust on our beetroot and chard, and chocolate spot on our field beans, which ended up killing them early in the season because we didn't take action early or aggressively enough. Our spinach seedlings decided they were quite content to stay 1" tall all season, and until around mid-December, caterpillars ate our kale and brussels sprouts before we could harvest any of them. Unlike in 2017, when ALL our brassicas bolted before forming useful taproots, florets, or hearts, we did manage to harvest a few good sized turnips, radishes, and daikons this year and a few forkfuls of broccoli, but they're taking more than twice as long to mature than the seed packet says.
We planted what we thought would be our easiest, most idiot-proof crops in our garden plot in town: potatoes, onions, and garlic. Since these are all staple crops for us, we planted significantly more than we did in 2017, but only ended up harvesting about two-thirds as much. Our alliums ended up getting completely engulfed by nasturtiums and simply never came out of dormancy, presumably because they didn't get enough sun. (On the bright side, we did get plenty of nasturtium pesto, and the alliums were happy to start sprouting when the nasturtiums finally died back in October, so hopefully we'll be able to harvest some of those in the spring.) As for our potatoes, we had a very long period of intense heat and drought in the middle of summer, which impacted potato harvests across the UK, so at least that one isn't entirely our fault.
Our oca was probably the biggest disappointment of the year though. We planted about a dozen really beautiful tubers in two different varieties, and they all grew vigorously throughout the year. When it came time to harvest though, we only ended up with about 8 tubers from one variety, and only one(!) from the other variety which had been the more vigorous of the two last year. All of the tubers in question are sad and runty enough that I'm not sure whether they're worth saving to plant next year.
Our brain chemistry being what it is, setbacks like these are what tends to stick in our memory. Thankfully, we keep pretty detailed records of what we harvest and when. Initially, we were feeling pretty disappointed with this year's harvest, but looking back over our spreadsheet for the year helped us to see that we didn't do too badly, all things considered.
Here's hoping for an even more productive 2019!
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