2025 Gardening Lessons – Track Your Harvests
(Butternut squash and Sugarbaby Watermelon on the vine, protected from squirrels with the wire mesh and mini bamboo skewers and given extra heat with black plastic bags on the ground over the root area plus cardboard for weed suppression.
It isn’t pretty but it works for us. – grins))
The Dear Wonderful Hubby and I like to harvest our vegetables and fruits when they’re ready (and sometimes before they’re ready). Because it is fun. And because…squirrels. (grins)
This means we’re harvesting a little bit at a time and that doesn’t seem like a lot but over the length of the growing season, that adds up.
This year, we tracked those mini harvests.
And we were both surprised at the total. We didn’t think we harvested much of anything. But we had. We simply hadn’t noticed it.
Track your harvests. Especially if you harvest daily.
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2025 Gardening Lessons – Warm The Soil More For Warmth-Loving Plants
Some plants like squash/courgettes, zucchini, and eggplant love the warmth.
In 2025, I put black plastic bags on the ground around the butternut squash plants and the zucchini plants when I moved them from the basement grow station to the great outdoors.
These plants did EXTREMELY well (for our garden).
I didn’t do this for the eggplant. And they did EXTREMELY poorly. They dropped leaves. They stopped growing. And that made them a target for insects.
The eggplants only started to flourish when the hot weather came. And in our neighborhood in 2025, that was way too late in the growing season.
In 2026, I plan to put the black plastic bags around the base of the eggplants also. This will heat up the soil, keeping the plants nice and toasty.
And I will remove the black plastic bags once the weather warms.
The black plastic bags will be put away and reused the next Spring.
I’m certain there are many more environmentally-savvy ways to heat the ground around plants, ways that don’t include plastic. And once I’ve researched that, I’ll likely switch to one of those ways.
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