Author: beautifulchaosorg

Hi, I am Carolien and I am a Dutch woman trying to build a self sufficient homestead on concrete and rubble. Follow my husband and me on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@straverhomestead9667

Garden thoughts from 2024 for the new garden season 2025

Notes and change ideas for the next garden season

This post will be amended and expanded as the ongoing garden season progresses

Tomatoes

After this year is turning out to be a disaster when it comes to tomato plants, I am probably not going to do any tomatoes next year, or maybe a few placed on a very windy and some what shady spot. The tomato plants should hardly make any work, since it is so questionable if we could harvest any tomatoes at all.

Garden 2

In our garden 2 we are somewhat giving up due to the so invasive and all overtaking couch grass, that we are going to remove almost all of the garden beds where there are no fruit trees in. The garden beds with fruit trees are going to be filled with perennial plants, so there would be little to no space for the couch grass, suffocating it this way.

We will be filling the space with a lot of strawberry plants, other berry plants and flower bushes and plants.

We will be keeping a garden bed with no fruit trees to fill with raspberries, because, I think, these are to overtaking to be planted with fruit trees. I am afraid they would suffocate the trees after a few years. And another garden bed with no fruit trees will be kept, because there are perennial plants in there already. And my daughter’s garden bed without fruit trees will be kept since that is already very full with raspberries and there is a currant plant in there as well.

This way there will be less garden beds we need to tent to, in terms of pulling out the grass, and we will be able to mow most of the garden with the lawn mower tractor, which saves a lot of time.

Taking out those mentioned garden beds will also give room to extent the small garden patch we have in this garden. This small garden patch is being taken over by some type of rhizome grass, which we will be rotary tilling after harvesting. We will have to watch this field closely and after the grass starts growing again we will be pulling it out (which should be easy after the rotary tilling) and probably rotary till a few more times with some time in between to get a usable garden patch again. We will also add some compost in the spring.

Notes, not related to a specific garden

I watched a garden tour video from someone who had started dahlia’s from seed. She hat so many different and so beautiful dahlia’s that I would like to try that next year.

Will I have any tomatoes to harvest at all?

Blight has struck already. Pruning hard and hoping for the best.

Compared to the last 4 seasons we have a ratter wet season this year with days of heat and cool nights. Sometimes the temperature at night drops below 10°C. Alongside the hot days there also are cooler days. Of course we are happy with rain on a somewhat regular base. The garden and nature really needs it, but the cooler nights cause morning fog after all that rain.

A few days ago I pass by the tomatoes (planning to harvest green beans) and noticed some blight on the first tomato plant. After further inspection all of the tomato plants where suffering from blight and I immediately pruned the tomatoes drastically. All that looked somewhat diseased was taken off, even some of the fruit that also was turning brown. Some tomato plants are even turning brown at the bottom of the stem already.

The stem of a tomato plant partially browned with blight and some green tomatoes still on the plant

This is so sad. The tomato plants outside looked so promising, carrying such beautiful fruit already, but no signs of turning red yet. The tomato plants in the greenhouse have some blight already as well.

I am thinking of not doing any tomatoes next year at all, but instead concentrate more on other crops.