I wrote this post back in December and never got around to posting it as I wanted to add a bunch of pictures but just never dug them up. These days I’m abiding by “some content is better then no content” so I’m just going to post as is!

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With the holiday season in flight and our calendars turning over, I thought I would take this natural pause to wrap up what we got up to around the outside of our home this year.

We hit some major milestones, like vending at markets and selling our first produce!
Some crop related stats:

• More then 162Kg tomatoes harvested
• 100+ L of tomato products canned
• Ample potatoes for the winter (so far at least)
• Carrots still holding fast in the fridge
• Pumpkins for the front porch
• 2ish L of Sriracha fermented with ripened jalapenos
• Seeds saved for comparable tomato harvest this year (assuming 80% germination rate)

If the tomato stats didn’t make it clear, I really like growing tomatoes – I find they’re an obvious “this is better in season” food that’s even better when fresh. That’s why this year, we’re looking at significantly expanding our tomato production with a focus on bringing the excess “to market,” whatever that may look like!

For data nerds, I’m still refining my process but here’s my current pivot table – there is definitely missing data.

This was my first year tracking harvest data, so I learned a lot about how to effectively harvest when you’re dealing with quantity. Unfortunately, this lead to some unrecorded data early season while I refined my process (and oddities like non-normalized sum of units into sum of weight as some sort of rounding)

As some of you know, I quit my job to pursue “this” full time. While “this” wasn’t (and isn’t) clear this year, we still had a fantastic year exploring and learning our land.

All that’s not to say we didn’t have challenges – the need for more diligent pest control became clear this year – a crop of potatoes (75 ft) was well stunted by a potato beetle infestation. 40% of our zucchini and 50% of our butternut squash was infected with squash vine borer (after an already poor 20% germination rate on the butternut squash).

Pickling cucumbers seemed nearly impossible to harvest at the right time, producing one or too cucumbers at a time and requiring daily inspection until the one cucumber was ready. I generally prefer growing things that don’t need daily, close up attention. We won’t be growing these again.

My “fail of the year” probably goes out to garlic. I missed planting garlic last fall, and tried to plant garlic EARLY spring (march) – instead of the garlic “cloving” into individual pieces, I got these sort of giant single garlics, kind of like an onion, but garlic. They don’t seem to keep very long, so I’m not on to anything fantastical. Rest assured, garlic is already in the ground this year.

Our chickens (a new addition this year) are still laying, eggs have become a staple part of our diet – they recently got an upgraded roof over their run with thanks to a neighbour.

And with that, we put a bow on 2024 and look to our plans for 2025. More to come as this shapes up to be an ambitious year!

With warmth,

Zach, Linden and Hydra

Photo gallery

Carrot harvesting day