The Humbled Homemaker: Box Garden Update: Victories, Disappointments & Lessons Learned

Our 3 baby box gardens

It’s been almost three months since we planted our 2011 box garden, and there are several things this humbled homemaker would like to report.

This year, our mere second year of gardening, we’ve definitely had our fair share of disappointments, but there have also been some victories—and lots of things we’ve learned.

Our zucchini in its better day--before beetles devoured them.

Biggest Disappointments

Green Beans-Whereas we had an overabundance of green beans last year, we haven’t had one this year. Rabbits ate the green bean plants as soon as they started to sprout. We re-planted. The rabbits re-ate.
Snap peas-This one was totally our fault. Snap peas are an early crop, and we waited until the first week of May to plant this year. We had a HOT May, and our poor peas just couldn’t take the heat. Whereas we had plenty of peas last summer, I’ve picked all of two from our poor, wilting plants.
Spinach-Again, we waited too late to plant. We only had a handful of spinach come up. We’ll try re-planting in the fall.

Squash/Zucchini-Rabbits ate our squash, and beetles devoured our zucchini. We did harvest a few zucchini before the beetles killed them. I'm now on the hunt for an organic pesticide.

Harvest time!

Biggest Victories

Peppers-We’ve gotten plenty of peppers: banana, bell and some other jalapeno-type pepper that we didn’t even realize we bought! I’m planning on freezing our abundance!
Tomatoes-This is year, we staked our tomato plants right! We’ve already gotten some big juicy ones, and plenty of others are just waiting to ripen!
Lettuce-We had enough for several large salads. We’ll re-plant this cooler-weather crop in the fall.
Blackberries-Ok, so we had absolutely nothing to do with this one, but God gave us an abundant harvest of wild blackberries on my parents' land!

If we had started with this fence, the rabbits may have been disappointed.

Things We’ve Learned

Plant earlier. We waited until the beginning of May. That was way too late.
Use a fence. We ended up putting one around each box AFTER the rabbits ate the green beans.
Seek out an organic pesticide. Part of our reasoning in growing our own food is that we will avoid conventional pesticides. However, it seems we need to invest in a non-toxic, organic one--at least for our zucchini! Does anyone have any ideas??