Annual Yields Thus Far and Notes on the Harvests

Since the beginning of the year, we have harvested 1816lbs of food.

We also gathered 2,125 eggs and butchered 5 roosters.

Yesterday I harvested 60lbs of potatoes during a livestream, which brought our complete sweet potato harvest thus far up to 155lbs.

They grew quite well in the Grocery Row Garden, despite an exceptionally dry summer.

Our biggest yield this year has been watermelons – and they also grew all through the GRG. If it hadn’t been for the melon vines, we would have planted a lot more sweet potatoes.

The strange “accidental” harvest that kicked our numbers up was the yield of the pumpkin vines that grew out of our compost pile.

They have yielded 281lbs of fruit so far and there are easily another 20 pumpkins out there which are still green. As the weather has cooled, the plants have decided to make many more. We’ve never seen pumpkins this vigorous before.

The 107lbs of pumpkins on the list are from the pumpkins we deliberately planted out in the food forest. They had nice mounds with compost in them, and did rather poorly in the heat and drought, getting totally blown away by the pumpkins we allowed to grow from the compost pile.

This will impact how we grow pumpkins next year.

Can you imagine if we just made 5 compost piles and threw pumpkins on them to rot? We could easily pass 1,000lbs of pumpkins in 2024. I say this year’s pumpkins were “accidental,” but that only applies to their germination. After they sprouted, we just left them alone to run, so we did allow them to take over the space they ran through.

Our potato yields were not great this year, though we were glad to have them in the spring. I believe we need more organic matter in the garden to make them happy. We hit 232lbs total, and the productivity of the Adirondack Blues was a nice surprise.

We don’t know how our yams or cassava will do after the severe lack of water, but I do think we’re likely to surpass 2,000lbs in yields by the end of the year.

Deo gratias!

We haven’t bothered weighing the greens we harvest here and there, or the herbs, as the weights are small and hard to figure out; yet I’m sure there’s a few more pounds there.

Also, the daikons in spring were wonderful, giving us a good yield which we then ate fresh, sautéed, and fermented. Another round is growing right now.

I love growing the cool-season crops after the heat of summer. It would be good if we got a mild fall without frost, as that would give these a running start. It will also give our remaining tropical root crops more time to grow.

Also, I haven’t even weighed these yet:

That’s probably another 50lbs! These white sweet potatoes are monsters.

Have a wonderful weekend.

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