A history about my recent foray into gardening.

2008

• Gained entry to Columbia Gardeners in ~March '08.  Thrilled to death at the possibilities of our very own 20'x25' plot!
• Tried strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, onions, zucchini, broccoli, watermelon, corn, green beans.  Failures included:
• Overwhelmed by weeds in July.
• Broccoli went straight to flower.
• Zucchini, corn, peppers did nothing.
• Don't recall garlic or onions (both in Spring) doing much.  I've since learned that that's typical of Spring planting.
• I think we got some tomatoes, but it's hard to recall.  My lasting memory was of the wife and I hacking through the weeds to get at anything.
• Beans did well, though.
• Used insecticidal soap as a deterrent.
• Wife became pregnant mid-Summer and was unable to assist with substantial gardening.  Being a first-time parent, I also stopped doing much in August.

2009

• New son!  Not being established as a gardener and as a first-time parent, we rapidly became overwhelmed with everything.
• Planted more or less the same stuff as 2008. 
• Tried starting plants from seed (heirloom) after doing a little research on prices of starters of organic starters available at Home Depot and other stores in the area.  Started by using a seed starting kit w/ clear plastic lid from HD.  
• Failed due to not removing the lid early enough.  Everything molded.
• Gave up our plot at the end of that year due to frustration and needing to focus on the family.

 2010

• Decided that while we still wanted to garden, we needed to do it on a smaller scale.  Decided to try it in our townhouse backyard.
• Purchased the square foot gardening book and researched the methods to increase efficiency.
• Built a number of square foot boxes to array around the perimeter of our back yard.  Planted a few types of tomatoes (purchased as starters as well as inheriting some extras friends/family had), peppers, and basil.  Had some success.
• Failures:
• Blossom end rot in pasting tomatoes.
• Discovered that parts of the back yard are poor for sun-loving tomatoes due to proximity to the trumpet creeper I have growing on one wall of our fence.  Tomatoes stretched for the sun and grew to 8' tall.

2011

• We decided that our son was getting to the age where he may enjoy doing some gardening with us.  We reapplied to regain a garden plot.
• Hearing nothing from the plot until sometime in June, we started a back yard garden again.  We were more careful with what we grew near to the trumpet creeper.
• Since our back yard was pretty well established, we experimented with the new plot.  Grew cantelopes, muskmelons, small watermelons, cayenne peppers, bell peppers, zucchini.
• Trying to learn our lesson from previous failures with weeds, we covered the bulk of the new plot with a thin (3/8") layer of newspaper and mulch.  This was at the recommendation of the manager of the site who does organic gardening.  Weeds were less prevalent, but still came on.
• Lessons learned: 
• Didn't put down enough newspaper
• Beyond tilling the garden once, didn't actively remove weed roots.
• Zucchini produced a single fruit, then the entire plant rotted.  Fine with me since I'm not a huge zucchini fan.
• Bell peppers never did much, potentially due to late start.
• Melons spread well.  Musk melons fruit never reached an appreciable size.  Watermelons produced a number of them, but never ripened entirely.  Cantalopes.......didn't recall what happened with them, but never ate any fruit from them.

2012

• In Dec '11/Jan '12, I resolved to do the garden right.  I realized that we commonly had a lot of problems with weeds (the site is a reclaimed field with many varieties) and that we often bailed on the garden plot in late July or early August due to being overwhelmed with all the weeding necessary.  I started planning.  
• My solution, derived from the Square-Foot Gardening book, was to build boxes for the garden.  I decided that I would isolate my plants from the soil medium which is rife with weeds.  I resolved to turn over the entire plot and screen the soil by hand to remove meaningfully-sized weed roots beginning in the Spring and continuing until complete.  Boxes would have a weed fabric barrier underneath and the paths would have greater thicknesses of newspaper along with the mulch applied.
• Buoyed by the warm winter, I got the itch for gardening around the same time I started doing a garden layout (I'll scan and upload the initial plan at some point).  I also decided to try seed starting again.  I'd been doing more reading (subscription to Mother Earth News, purchased and read The Heirloom Life Gardener, websites) and grew more and more suspicious of how truly "organic" started plants were from stores around me.  I decided to try it again.  That turned out to be a tremendous undertaking that I wasn't prepared for.  Also a lot of lessons-learned from that effort.  More on that some other time.
• In an attempt to gain efficiency, I decided to only grow high-efficiency plants.  Cucumbers, tomatoes, beans (red, green, and lima), peas, and peppers.  I started the tomatoes and peppers from seed at home.
• I researched companion planting.  In my initial foray, I interplanted tomatoes and peppers and basil together, planted radishes with the cucumbers and let them go to flower, and planted marigolds at least two to a box.
• After building my first 3 boxes out of 2x12's I purchased at Home Depot, the wife said I needed to change how I got my lumber.  Simply too expensive.
• Thankfully my brother and sister-in-law recommended I try Community Forklift, a fantastic salvage yard close by.  I've obtained the bulk of the lumber for my boxes from there since then.
• I've attempted to avoid using pressure-treated lumber due to the likelihood/certainty of chemicals being leeched into my food crops. 
• It was a ton of work to build the boxes and weed the entire plot (actual area is 18'x24').
• Failures:
• Tomatoes developed some sort of fungus and yellowed.  Also, most would develop a blush then rot on the vine.  
• Peppers were stunted and didn't produce much.
• Cucumbers initially did very little, finally produced somewhat toward late summer.
• Beans did great initially, but were eradicated by the Mexican Bean Beetle.
• Lessons learned: 
• I overwatered initially.  Initially being defined as May through mid-July after I did more research.  After cutting way back, the tomatoes and cucumbers did a good bit better.
• I overdid it with all the weeding.  I strained something in a forearm which made me have to bail on much of the gardening in late August.  Too worn out.
• Need more research into companion planting.  Cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers were left alone by bugs.  Surprisingly, neem oil was laughed at by the Bean Beetles.
• Start far fewer tomato and pepper seeds.  I'll elaborate on seed starting at a later time.
• Natural fiber twine breaks down too quickly in sunlight.  The cucumber trellis I lashed together disintegrated rather quickly.
• Need to diversify a little more.  If all my tomato and pepper plants produced as planned, we would have been buried even if the wife had canned and frozen most of them.
• My wife had become pregnant again in the beginning of April. I had the realization in early October that I would really need to get started with preparing the garden for Spring immediately if I want to successfully garden in 2013.  I went back to the plot and started tackling the few areas I hadn't weeded or done the newspaper/mulch barrier.  I was pleased to find that what I had done previously greatly reduced the weeds that did appear.
• Progress at end of December:
• The entire plot has been weeded.  A one-foot-wide swath of the common path outside the plot was also weeded.
• Four new boxes were built with two of them having been sunk into the plot.  They are where a few spindly and non-productive raspberry plants used to reside.
• I purchased some 2x4's to build an arbor adjacent to the gate into the plot.  Nothing too laborious or elaborate, but still functional and serviceable.  The plan is to build the arbor adjacent to where I will grow scarlet runner beans to provide shade, food, and beauty.  I also intend to build an Adirondack chair to place under the arbor.
• More paths have been newspapered/mulched.  Only spaces left to get that treatment are around where the last boxes went in (installed in the 1st week of January '13), the entryway into the plot, and area underneath the arbor.
• I purchased a lot of 1/8" plastic to sink along the fence line with the rationale being that they would help deter vining plants from entering the plot from the outside.  On my four borders, I have a lady whose plot is very weedy, a family who kindly planted asparagus on our shared fence, the common path (loaded with mowed weeds and crabgrass), and a gentleman who has some mint that likes working its way into my/our plot.  The plan is to sink the plastic ~8" deep to prevent the bulk of exterior weeds entering in.
• Seeds for 2013 have been identified and ordered.
• The best thing to mention -- our baby girl was a Christmas gift for me.  I hope to be able to introduce her to some of our crops late in the summer as she begins eating solid foods.