The last harvest has been done, the yard cleaned, the last walls built and the sprinklers blown out… with just days to spare before the first snowfall. According to Environment Canada, this is the second highest amount of snowfall we have had on any day in October. The highest day was back in 1933, so it has been a while. Sure, we’ve had a skiff of snow here and there, but nothing that sticks around and nothing that skipped us right past the end of fall and Halloween and made it instantly winter.

Overall we had a great garden year. This decision to collect data each year has been awesome. It is so interesting to put actual numbers to how much we grew and recording which items did well and which items did not. Now that our permanent beds are in place, I plan to record more data to help guide us in future years. I will record where in the garden everything grows, what plants are around it, abnormal weather patterns, and any bug issues we have. Hopefully it will help us maximize what our garden produces. Here is the overall data for this year.

We grew an overall weight of 168.21 lbs. That is a lot of food! Using pricing from Superstore and Save-on and averaging the price of items, we saved approx $505.90 this year by growing our own food. Plus, produce fresh from the garden tastes so much better.

We had a total of 24 varieties of food plants in the yard. The graph above lumps some of the varieties together and also does not note the two plants that did not produce any harvest this year. Our brussel sprouts got some sort of bug infestation and rust before we could harvest any, and the butternut squash had some that started but always died once it reached a certain size. My spaghetti squash and watermelon barely made it into the harvest category, providing just a small sample of each for us to try. I’ll be doing some research this winter so that I can fix those issues for next year.

In regards to the items above that we grew varieties of, here is how those split up.

We had our main strawberries from our tower and then we had our surprise wild strawberry patch in the driveway. Although we harvested a lot from the driveway patch, they are so small that they hardly weigh anything. I think you would probably need about 15 driveway berries to equal 1 from our strawberry tower, so the chart is slightly deceiving.

By happy accident we ended up with both spring onions and sweet onions. Both provided green onion tops with the spring onion having a more delicate and small green onion top.

Once again we had sweet green peppers and hot peppers. Hopefully next year with an earlier start in the house, the sweet peppers plant will be bigger with an earlier development of peppers.

I had both long English and lemon cucumbers. I like the lemon cucumbers as a splash of colour on salads. They are a nice bright yellow with a standard cucumber flavour. They are also round shaped so it adds for more unique shapes cut into the salad. Our long English did better this year than it did last year, providing us with enough cucumbers that I didn’t need to purchase any all summer.

It will be interesting to see how many charts I end up with based on how many varieties of veggies I would like to put in.