Are you a goal-setter? For me, it kind of goes with the territory – since I’m self-employed, I have to set goals constantly or else I’d get very little done. I even set goals for my garden and last year in January, I shared them both here on the blog and my YouTube channel.
Before I dive into setting goals for this season, I thought I’d share a little recap of what I did accomplish and what I didn’t. Below the recap video you’ll also find a list of all my goals – in some cases we filmed a video about the progress o n specific goals and I linked to those too.
Here’s the whole list with links to related videos:
- Lettuce trial – we trialled 8 different varieties out of which ‘Claredon’ was our favourite – unfortunately the rabbits liked it best too!
- Butternut squash trial – we grew 3 varieties: ‘Hunter’, Harrier’ and ‘Anna’. Out of the three ‘Anna’ gave us the biggest harvest. Here’s a video about all the winter squash varieties we grew this year where you can see more:
- Find a great cherry tomato for the greenhouse – we grew ‘Sungold’, ‘Black Cherry’, ‘Sunchocola’, ‘Superrsweet 100’, ‘Sweet Aperitif’ and ‘Romello’. We thought ‘Black Cherry’ was the best tasting, but ‘Sungold’ was second and more productive. For more details, watch this video:
- Plant a row of summer fruiting raspberries – YES! We planted a row of ‘Sanibelle’ but still need to give it some support.
- Finish planting edible climbers around the pergola – YES! Finished the planting and will share more this summer when the first climbers start bearing fruit.
- Graft a delicious apple variety from our friends’ garden – unfortunately, this one fell through. I contacted my friends and found out their tree died.
- Try a polyculture for sowing around midsummer – YES! An interesting experiment that I will continue with, mostly to adjust the proportions of the seeds. We filmed two videos about this:
8.mustard greens trial – YES! We grew 12 varieties and filmed a video about our findings:
- sow spinach earlier for a better harvest – I compared three sowings: the first was started on a windowsill in January, the second in the greenhouse in February and the third outside in March. The presown spinach gave the best results. I shared a bit about this in my April harvest video:
- Grow 1 bed of annual cut flowers – I did that and for a short while the bed was beautiful. But then we got a record breaking hot and dry summer and weren’t able to keep up with the picking of the flowers because the rest of the garden required more upkeep than usual. Therefore they ran to seed prematurely and we only got a few bouquets from this patch. Some selfsowed though and if the seedlings survive the winter, they might give us a nice early harvest next year!
- Grow dahlias for their edible tubers – we grew dahlia ‘FANTASTIC’ from Lubera and it was surprisingly tasty.
- Mulch around our mixed edible hedge – sadly, we only managed to mulch a small portion of it. We’ll try to do better this year!
- Grow what we eat – I feel like I did pretty well on this.
- Keep better records – also AFTER our summer vacation! – moderate success with this one. There is still definitely room for improvement.
- Plant Bodinier’s beautyberry just for its beauty – YES! Also found out (thanks to one of my viewers) that the berries are edible!
- Plant a hardy pomegranate – I bought one but am keeping it in pot to plant out in spring.
- Take a course in pruning restricted forms of fruit trees – YES! And glad I did because it was one of the last courses Mr. Freriks was teaching (he turns 90 this year).
- Organise an OPEN DAY in June – YES! We did this on 24th June and it was great to welcome so many enthusiastic visitors!
Overall I’m pretty proud of all the things we did accomplish – especially considering this was the busiest year for me so far: I gave the most talks, taught the most courses, wrote countless articles and WROTE A BOOK! (More about that in a future post).
Have you had any goals for 2018? Or are you setting any for this year?