As 2020 winds down and the new year begins, I've realized that I accumulated a good amount of experience growing plants over this most recent season! This is mostly for myself to reflect on all of the important lessons this year taught me, so that next year can be more productive.

I started 2020 with the goal to grow 1,000 pounds of produce... and I maybe hit it? At the beginning, I meticulously weighed each harvest and wrote the weight down on a sheet of paper. As simple as that sounds, I get lazy with routine. After a handful of harvests, I stopped the recording for particular reason, and once I stopped, I felt that to continue would be inaccurate, and thus meaningless.

Before the "heavy hitters" (of squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, etc.), I had already recorded ~300 pounds – it doesn't seem too far off to assume that my goal was hit, but I can't say for certain.

In the end, it was a silly goal – why does weight matter? I found myself optimizing each planting for weight. I planted more squash than I could eat in a lifetime, and at one point I was harvesting a half-dozen zucchinis a day.

So my over-arching goal this is year is to plant smarter: to grow plants that I'll eat, to space plantings so that produce is available in the right amounts, and to grow more variety, instead of massive amounts of produce that you can easily find in the store.

But also, my goal is to learn from the lessons below. Maybe you'll find these useful. Enjoy!

  • Succession planting: At one point I had 104 mature (and enormous heads of lettuce), and realized that we would have to 3-4 heads of lettuce a day, every day, just to ensure they didn't go to waste. Plant a few heads every 10 days or so to ensure that there's always some available.
  • Harvesting at the right time is critical: Plants go through a natural cycle of freshness. If you harvest too early, you'll be left with small gains, but if you harvest too late, much of what you planted will be in early stages of decay, and you'll be tempted to throw much away, unless you're comfortable eating that which is slightly rotten. Timing depends on the plant, but often the window for the perfect harvest is less than a week long.
  • Irrigation systems: The Northwest gets incredibly dry mid-July through mid-September. Going outside and watering is tedious as hell, and easy to forget. Watering systems are really easy, and frankly pretty cheap. There's an entire irrigation aisle at my nearest Home Depot, and it's honestly kind of fun to work on. The ultimate objective is to have a PVC inlet at the beginning of each row, and 0.5" tubing extending down the row.
  • Trim your tomato plants: Despite my best effort, my tomato plants grew to be a forest of 6 ft. tall behemoths, which resulted in TONS of wasted tomatoes.
  • Cherry tomatoes are the worst: For me, at least. They're obnoxious to pick, and super difficult to make into sauce (if you remove the skins, like I do). I don't like to eat them raw, so why did I grow so many cherry tomato plants?!
  • Harvest your seeds: I let about a dozen lettuce plants go to seed, and now I have close to 1k seeds of my favorite open-pollinated varieties. No need to buy lettuce seeds this year. You can shop for "OP" varieties while seed shopping, and harvest the fruits of your labor. It's pretty easy to pick out a few dozen seeds while making tomato sauce, ending up with a slightly more uniform sauce.
  • Building large garden beds is an absolute mess: I built four 25 ft. x 4 ft. garden beds out of corrugated roofing and pressure-treated lumber. They each cost ~$150, required an enormous amount of material to fill, and turned out looking shoddy. Don't do what I did. If you're going to do long beds, just create rows of raised soil! If you're dead set on constructing raised beds, make them half as tall as I did, or approach it completely differently than me. No matter how you go about it, many raised beds in a large space are going to be either high cost or high effort, probably both.
  • Pitchfork is the best tool: Culturally, the spade reigns supreme in the mythology of gardening tools, though we often mistakenly call it a "shovel". But frankly, it sucks, unless you're simply trying to dig a hole. For most garden work, where soil is well connected, or roots hard to penetrate, you can get far more utility out of a nice fork (pitch / hay / manure). This one from Home Depot has been an absolute gem, and seems to be forged in Austria / assembled in America.
  • Japanese tool is second best tool: I don't really know what to call this thing... probably a "hand hoe-cultivator" or something. From some Google searching, I've found the term "cuttlefish hoe". Whatever it is, it's amazing, and is an incredible tool for taking out weeds or manipulating soil by hand. I use it for weeding, planting, or simply cultivating a small area in the bed.
  • Pickaxe is third best tool: When it comes to landscaping duties, the pickaxe reins supreme. It's my first tool of choice when it comes to clearing ground, digging, defining borders, etc. My only tip: Pick up a light one! You don't need the weight for breaking apart soil, and it's a real back-saver.
  • Wood chips are supreme: Wood chips are amazing weed suppressants. Even though weeds eventually grow through them, they're 5x easier to remove since the soil beneath is so loose. They're perfect for creating walkways, defining borders, mulching around larger plants or your house – anything you want! Plus, they're extremely cheap, or in my case totally free. Arborists need to pay to get rid of their chips, so an awesome service called ChipDrop exists that links arborists with gardeners who need those chips. In my area, there's an abundance of chips, and I've got about a 10 yard pile in the yard at any given time. The only drawbacks: There's likely more demand than supply in more urban areas so you may have to wait, and you really have no control over the type of wood, chip size, or load amount: You take what you're given.
  • Gorilla carts are amazing: The number of times that my wheelbarrow has clipped some small divot and sent my nards into the handle... it's a wonder we're having kids. Get a gorilla cart! They come in a variety of sizes, you can dump loads so much easier, and they're infinitely easier to operate than a wheelbarrow.
  • The best seed starter mix: Don't buy seed starter mix, it's a complete rip off! Instead, you can buy a few supplies, and create the same mix for much cheaper. Here's the combination I use: 5 parts peat moss or coconut coir, 1-2 parts perlite, 0.5 part vermiculite, 0.25 part fertilizer. The bulk of it is perlite and peat moss, both of which are very cheap for large quantities.
  • Experimentation with seed blocks: I also started a number of plants with seed blocks. I found the process a lot more complicated and messy, for minimal benefit. Will probably try again in the future; I don't think I really gave it a fair shake, and I do think you can have fewer issues with roots being bound.
  • Dig holes for potatoes, don't hill them: It's easier, and I found a lot of my potatoes ended up being sunburnt. Better yet, try growing potatoes in cloth soil bags.
  • Build stronger trellises: I built a bean trellis out of thin bamboo, and it had basically collapsed by the time the plants had found their way to the top. It's easy to forget how much plants actually weigh!
  • The compost pit: I found that I have quite a lot of compost, and so I've started just throwing everything into a giant compost pit. Over the years it will decompose and because rich soil in its own right. I have enough space that it's pretty easy to simply start a new pit elsewhere when this one's full.
  • Order seeds early: With pandemic, it seems like everything is in short supply, seeds included. Order everything in January or February.
  • Water the trees, not just the plants: It's easy to simply think that trees have deep enough roots to find water... and it's true, they're definitely more drought tolerant, but when we're 3+ weeks without meaningful rain, it's time to start watering the trees as well, especially if they're young!
  • Go slug hunting: Slug season was particularly bad in 2020, where we had a fairly wet spring. I was able to kill hundreds of slugs by heading out with a headlamp around 10pm.
  • Watch out for other critters: Click beetle larvae killed 75% of one of my lettuce crops, and you still need to be weary of caterpillars, leaf cutters, rabbits, etc. Each require their own approach.
  • Plant successes: Beans, beets, garlic, lettuce, kale, summer squash, onion.
  • Plant failures: Cabbage (decimated by bugs), carrots (short and stubby), eggplant (extremely slow growing), winter greens (too cold too quickly)
  • Mixed success: Tomatoes (lots of blossom end rot and late blight), winter squash (a few good ones, but many destroyed by drought), potatoes (some great, but many were blighted or otherwise rotten).
  • Add flowers to your garden: Don't only think about produce! Make your garden pretty. Practice artistry. Also, it brings in pollinators.
  • Weed control: The best way to control weeds is with frequent suppression. Literally, don't let them take root. The most important thing to do is to kill seedlings by taking them out at the root. Never let weeds go to seed.
  • Practice consistency: Don't get lazy in the late season. That's often when the garden needs you most.
  • Order compost: You probably need more than you can make, and your garden will thank you. Alternatively, you can rent a trailer or borrow a truck.
  • Make it a group activity: As much as you can, work with others. Makes it a whole lot more enjoyable, and it's nice to have someone to brainstorm with. My mom is my gardening inspiration, and she spent a lot of time with me in the garden, luckily, helping me think through various problems. My mother-in-law was a big driving force behind the garden, by consistently pushing me to do more, and being there to encourage me. Whenever I was tired after doing a number of compost loads, she'd always push me to do one more, pushing the cart with me.
  • Expect loss: Just because a plant was hit by pests, doesn't mean it's done for: "Don't just do something, stand there!" Plants are made to survive. But also, expect some amount of your food will go bad, either by disuse or by pests, and adjust planting amounts accordingly.
  • Pathways: Build a path to your garden, and within your garden. Make it exciting to walk there. It's a satisfying activity