The first year for this site is now in the past. Before starting a new gardening year and moving forward with 2021, let’s take a look back at 2020.
This website started last year, in the spring of 2020, with limited knowledge of what it took to manage a website. My intent was to take time to share gardening ideas with rather infrequent posts throughout the year. Which worked up until the site went down in July. Not knowing exactly what to do and being busy with the summer gardening, I basically told myself that if the site will go down after only a few months that maybe website management was not for me! Then the site came back up after a few months of downtime. Apparently the WordPress upgrade that took it down was eventually self corrected and the site has been back up for a couple of months now. Anyway, I am not asking any questions nor seeking any answers, but will just forge ahead in 2021!
Talking about 2020, wow what a year! Thank goodness my wife and I had our retirement and our hobby interests to get through the year unscathed and healthy. (Like Cicero said, we made good use of the garden and library in 2020.) Our hearts and blessings go out to all those not as fortunate as we were and are. Not having to deal with the burdens of work life, kids and school, and the many other issues that those around us were navigating on a daily basis, makes us count our blessings. So far, 2021 is feeling like there is a new and better path ahead for us. God willing, we will beat the virus this year and get back to some normalcy. Maybe a new normal, but normal none the less.
Anyway, back to 2020 gardening. Overall, the 2020 garden was a success. The weather season on the Colorado Front Range was bound by a late frost on June 8th and a hard early freeze and snow on September 9th. Not typical for this area but none the less always possible. The early June frost was warded off with some frost protection covers. The early September storm was managed by doing a final harvest, as most of the plants were past peak maturity anyway.
It was the first year for the north garden beds and there was good, but not great, yields of tomatoes, cucumbers and sweet corn. The broccoli and cauliflower were so so. A deer netting concept on the tomato and broccoli beds worked effectively but was cumbersome to use. (I will write a separate posts about deer netting this year as we are trying a new concept for deer control in 2021.)
Early, peak and late corn sequencing worked well. We had about six separate meals of fresh corn from the garden from July 21 to September 1. And froze an additional 9 pints. Only one of 6 broccoli plants made a head and about half the cauliflower did the same. So more work is needed on the cabbage family front! (For these two cabbage family cultivars, the space they take and the limited yield they provide, do not seem to make it beneficial to grow them.) However, and not surprisingly, we did get good yields of kohlrabi.
The tomato bed produced a good continuous crop. But it was not an overwhelming success. I planted 10 plants spaced in a 5×11 foot bed. It ended up being a little crowded. This year there will be 8 plants in the same size bed. Peppers were grown in hefty plastic container tubs. One plant per tub and the yield was more than enough. We froze and dried many in addition to the fresh servings.
Other vegetables of potatoes, onions, beans, squash along with the leafy greens produced well. Yielding enough for fresh eating and later storage.
Below is a photo gallery of our north garden progress through the year.
May 21, First Planting 
June 8, Prep for Late Frost June 11, Post Frost June 26, Deer Netting & Hoops July 11 August 1, Pulled Broccoli, Crowded Tomatoes August 17, Pulled Corn September 9, Early Frost/Snow September 17, Post Snow Clean Up
We are looking forward to the 2021 gardening season. Planning is well underway, the seed inventory has been replenished and the sixtythreesixty site is up and running again. Hopefully mother nature will provide good rains and a few extra weeks of harvest time this year. 2020 may have lapped over into January, but as the calendar turns to February, the new year looks promising!
