5 Year Harvest Chart

I've collected lots of harvest data over the past 5 years so I thought it would be informative to see how the different years compared on a broad scale and in particular how 2014 stacks up against previous years. All this information is also good for planning for the coming year.

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
	Lb.	Lb.	Lb.	Lb.	Lb.
Amaranth	2.1	1.9		4	1.9
Arugula	0.1			0.9	9.6
Beans, Green	19.1	33.9	39.2	35.8	37.3
Beans, Dried	9.3	3.5	8.5	9.1	15.6
Beets	26.1	17.4	4.2	34.1	32.7
Beet Greens		9.9	2.2	0.5	1.5
Broccoli	16	28.2	17.4	33.3	48.2
Cabbage, incl. Asian	16.7	39.5	18.3	20.1	8.6
Cabbage, Tronchuda		3.3	3	8.8	3.2
Capers	3.7	2.1	3.1		5.2
Carrots	5.2			20.5	9.1
Cauliflower					21.0
Celery	1.9	8.8	2.8	13.5	12.8
Celery Root	35.5	7.3		6.5	4.8
Chamomile	1.2	0.3			1.0
Chard	19.6	6.9	4.7	13.6	39.9
Corn, Flint					10.9
Cucumbers	12	15.8	37.5	81.8	59.5
Eggplant	34.7	16.2	51.3	72.2	56.3
Fava beans	105.2	112.7		34.2	71.3
Fennel	1.8			4.1	18.4
Gai Lan					3.1
Garlic	19.8	7.6		5.6	14.4
Corn Salad and Mache	0.7	0.8		8.9
Kale	12.4	4.4	11.5	14.2	9.5
Kohlrabi	17.5
Lettuce	20.8	19.7	12.1	28.2	32.1
Melons				20.5	37.9
Mizuna	1.2				4.0
Onions	4.5		11.5	1	89.3
Pak Choi				2.9	3.4
Peas	7.8	34.6	10.9	6.6	5.2
Pea Shoots		2.1		0.2	3.8
Peppers	44.8	15.5	122.2	126.7	107.9
Poppy Seeds	2.8	0.6
Potatoes	9.2	2.3
Radicchio		2.7
Radishes					9.4
Rapini	10.9	2.1		6.6	7.5
Romanesco	10.3	7.4			4.7
Spinach		5.7	2.4	13.2	18.7
Tomatoes	148.9	110	358.9	206.2	220.5
Wheat					2.1
Winter Squash	39.7	38.6		25.4	7.1
Yu Choy Sin		1.3
Zucchini	27.6	18	49.1	124.7	155.6
Zucchini Blossoms	2.5	0.8	0.1	0.1	2.0
	691.6	581.9	770.9	984	1207.0

One of the first things that I looked at was what was new or what I finally had a measure of success with in 2014. Those items are highlighted and a few things really stand out.

• Arugula. I finally found an arugula that I really like and that is really easy to grow. I used to buy it regularly and now I harvest it regularly. I'll have to do a spotlight post on Speedy one of these days.
• Cauliflower, this was the first year that I ever had success growing cauliflower and I managed to pull it off twice with a summer and a fall crop.
• My first experiments with growing flint corn were pretty successful. One row of the Floriani Red didn't pollinate well so I may experiment with bagging corn tassels this year for doing hand pollination.
• I've been fooling around with fennel off and on over the years without a lot of success. Last year was better than usual, but I still need to work at it. It's one of those veggies where timing is critical for success and I still haven't nailed down the right time to start it. 
• Gai Lan was a first in 2014. I liked it a lot and I'm going to continue to grow it but I need to make some improvements, such as figuring out the optimal spacing and just how much to grow per succession. Now I wish I could figure out how to grow Yu Choy, I've only ever succeeded in growing it once. That could be a project for 2015.
• The big jump in the onions was because I advanced from growing just scallions and bunching onions to growing bulbing onions too. 
• Radishes. Such a basic vegetable to grow but I never had significant success before, never enough to bother to record, and that was likely because I haven't loved them enough to be bothered to figure out how best to grow them or to keep successions going. It helps that I've expanded my interest away from just salad radishes to other types of radishes that are more versatile in the kitchen.
• Wheat. An experiment that I won't bother to try again. It was fun to watch it grow but there's no way I can grow enough to meet my needs and I'm sure the quality is no where near that of wheat that I can buy. The space is better devoted to something else (like more onions!).

Not highlighted but worth noting is a renewed interest in growing Mizuna. 2014 was the first year that I experimented with growing it as a cutting green. I actually use it when I grow it that way. In the past I always waited for it to form a head and then when it did I didn't get around to harvesting it, so it bolted, so it went into the compost.

Lessons from 2014 to be taken into consideration for 2015:

• My overall goal for the year is more variety.
• I grew a larger quantity of pantry items in 2014 and would like to maintain or increase those types of crops. Dried beans can keep for a couple of years and the more I grow the less I purchase. (Sorry Rancho Gordo) I may plant more dried beans in place of snap beans. I've been growing two varieties of snap beans per trellis, this year I'll try three - more variety less overall production. My husband loves garbanzo beans so I'm going to experiment with some this year. The flint corn will also keep a couple of years so this year I'm trying 2 or maybe 3 flour corns.
• Too much zucchini! I didn't fully appreciate how grossly over productive the hybrid Romanesco zucchini is (first grown in 2013) until I looked back at the zucchini harvests when I grew other varieties. I'm not growing that variety this year.
• Too many cucumbers. I don't do pickles so one or two plants should suffice. Really Michelle, just 1 or 2 plants.
• More winter squash. The mini butternuts weren't as productive as expected. I'm going to add another small squash to the lineup.
• 48 pounds of broccoli was a bit much. I did freeze some and the frozen broccoli is perfect for making the nearly weekly frittata that I make for Dave for his lunches, but I'm going to cut back. We'll actually, that's sort of a lie, I'm expanding the varieties of broccoli that I'm growing, but they aren't as long cropping as Di Ciccio, so more types with fewer harvests from each plant, more successions. 48 pounds wasn't really too much, but 48 pounds of one variety might have been. More variety!
• Fewer tomatoes. I want to try to grow as many or more varieties but do some pruning to limit the overall productivity. I'm still working on canned and frozen tomatoes from 2013!
• I'm not yet ready to cut back on peppers or eggplant. Well, actually I did cut back in 2014, the previous year I had half of one bed devoted to peppers and about a third of another bed devoted to eggplant and peppers. In 2014 I put all my solanums in one bed, the peppers got less than half the bed and the eggplant less than a quarter, the tomatoes got the rest. The plants were just more productive in 2014.

Let's take a look back at previous years.

2010 was a mixed year. I had two big problems in the garden that year, both of which convinced me that I needed to invest in having some BIG planter boxes. First, gophers and moles had discovered my beds and figured out how to circumvent the wire mesh that I had lining the beds. It became nearly impossible to grow root vegetables because if the gophers didn't eat them the moles pushed them around. That's when I gave up trying to grow potatoes, I didn't (still don't) like them enough to make those battles worthwhile. Second, the nearby oak trees were sending their roots into a couple of the beds and sucking up all the water and nutrients. My peppers couldn't compete that year and produced nearly nothing. The tomatoes had a difficult time competing as well. I had more tomato plants in 2010 than 2014, 11 plants versus 8 (to start, Black Krim met an early demise) but the 2014 harvest was nearly 150% of the 2010 harvest. Note however the 17.5 pounds of kohlrabi. I had no problems with growing kohlrabi, but we didn't eat it all, it languished in the fridge until it went into the compost. Lesson learned, I haven't grown it since.

Looking back at 2011, the annual total is the lowest because it was a horrible year for rats. There was a population explosion all over the valley and they were into everything. They ate more of my tomatoes than I did, the total for the year was half what it should have been. They destroyed my strawberries entirely. Cucumbers seemed to be another favorite, especially the babies. Oh, and melons, I actually grew melons that year but didn't get to harvest a single one, none of them got anywhere near maturity because the rats ate them, all of them. Peppers were another tasty rat treat. Seemingly just about anything was on their menu. Favas were a success because they matured and were harvested before the invasion.

You may notice that 2012 was an off year for certain vegetables, that year was an anomaly because each garden bed was out of commission for at least part of the year because I was converting them from barely contained mounds to full on planter boxes. There were some "must grow" veggies that I didn't have that year, including favas, garlic, and winter squash because the space didn't exist when it was required. It's interesting to note that even though I didn't grow some significant producers that year the total harvest still exceeded the harvests in the two previous years. That difference and the increases in total harvests for 2013 and 2014 really help me to rationalize the investment in those big boxes.

I started off 2013 with 3 planter boxes, the last one wasn't constructed and filled until May, so that had an impact on the total productivity for the year. One of the things to note about 2013 is that it shows a few of my efforts to adjust what I grow to meet my needs rather than what is possible. For instance, I halved the amount of space devoted to fava beans, 100+ pounds far exceeds what I can use. I cut back on the number of tomato plants as well. I tried to get a little more variety into the harvests too - carrots made a return, another attempt at fennel was made, melons escaped the notice of the rats, and I managed a few harvests of pak choi. Other things however were out of control, most notably zucchini and cucumbers - but that doesn't mean I cut back on those in 2014, some lessons are more difficult to learn than others.

I don't know what motivates other gardeners to blog about their gardens, but for me the primary reason is to document what's going on in the garden and being able to look back at past experiences. My memory is short and in general I don't remember what worked or didn't work. I don't remember what was growing when or how well it did. There are only a few crops that I remember the planting schedule for and when I can reasonably expect a harvest. My blog allows me to go back and see how the garden performed, how I performed as a gardener. But blogging is just one tool in the shed, I've found that weighing and keeping track of my harvests helps me to decide what and how much to grow. What the blog doesn't show are the notes and spread sheets that I keep. In 2014 I seriously started working on keeping track of when I sow seeds and when I set out transplants. This past weekend I put together a spreadsheet that integrates that sowing and planting data with the harvest data for 2014. I hope this new tool will help me to refine my planning and improve the successions. I'll write a bit about that in a future post.