Crystal Madrilejos

The yhs: Fruits & Vegetable Garden is coming to its end for the season and overall it’s been a mixture of success and failure. We knew this first year was going to be a huge learning experience and in that sense we were a success.

On the other hand, some things were devastating failures. The main one being the deer situation. We truly underestimated their desire to eat all our hard work despite all the beautiful foliage there is to eat outside of the garden. Though some things didn’t work out for us regardless of the deer (such as melons and cucumbers) I think the deer were the main culprit for destroying not only our plants but our morale as well. I think after the first few hits by the deer we realized that no matter how much love and care we put into the garden those pesky deer were going to get in there and wreck the place anyway. So, for next year our main focus is going to be keeping the deer out because, honestly, it’s not worth the time and effort if we can’t keep them out. Or we could just grow solely kale because they didn’t seem to care for that!

But I’m not going to dwell only on the bad things. There were some things that grew really really well! I’m happy to report that we had a fair share of lettuces, potatoes, green beans, carrots, zucchini, butternut squash, broccoli, cabbage, spinach, kale, basil, snow peas, green peas, and (dried) lima beans.

Some things that grew well, but then were ruined by the deer were swiss chard, tomatoes, strawberries, and our second round of green beans. We were able to harvest some of these things but not as much as we would have liked.

We also got a few cucumbers, one pepper, two tiny eggplants and about a million pea tomatoes. Let me just say that we planted way too many pea tomato plants. They are extremely cute (being smaller than even a grape tomato) but not really worth the effort of picking all those little guys. Note for next year: only one pea tomato plant.

–c.