The 2018 Garden At-A-Glance

Five months of work, reduced to snapshots. Well, work spanning five months. A lot of the ‘work’ was a couple early harvests, spot-check weeding, and lots of watering. Those tasks didn’t take more than 45 hours total. We did get 5 very hard rains among the other 30 rainstorms this year. Nothing of ours washed away, but in some instances, plants fell over, a few branched snapped right off at the base, and some peppers burst. You can see where silt and mud pooled after one of the massive rains in the photo of June 24th.

We added those extra buckets of compost and mulch on July 21st. You can see on the 29th how much growth took place after the application. Then jump to August 11th and see the growth. Now look at September 2nd. This is just cardboard, compost, raw wood chips, and a mineral meal mix (eggshells, wood ash, baked chicken poop, ground bones, coffee grinds, Epsom salts, and sulfur).

Between September 2nd and September 13, we were hit with another fierce rainstorm. You can see bare spots in the garden. That is where bushes have fallen over. Some plants grew so big, we had to cut them out of the cages. Three of the cayennes’ cages were not able to support them and were mangled when they fell over. They had to be cut out. I have never seen that before. Next year, we’ll try bamboo stakes driven nice and deep

October is our last growing month. It only takes one frost to kill everything. We are on borrowed time right now. Any day the weather can turn and we are done for the season.

Sadly, on the night of October 11, 2018, the temperature dipped into the 40’s. We were able to pick 30 lbs, with another 3lbs in a paper bag as our attempt to get them to ripen. Every pepper counts at this point as we are just BARELY going to meet our minimum yield threshold. Luckily, we picked another 30 lbs of peppers before we pulled all the plants out of the ground. That last harvest gave us enough pods so we can make our peppers dusts.

This year was incredible. We tripled our land and our yield. We upgraded all of our equipment and revamped out website. We had a ton of fun with the food cartoons earlier this year. Our Kickstarter project…could have had a better outcome, but we made it all work. We will be fermenting for the next month then bottling in December with sales starting then.

Thank you all for being an audience to this. Buy the sauces. Share this page and the sauces. Give us feedback. Burn everything!

There are things in the works right now that will make next year even more sensational! See you soon!