The Best One Yet! From Seed Starting To The Final Harvest! 2024 Backyard Garden Recap!

hey guys welcome back if you're new here hi i'm brie i live in kansas zone 7a and today i am going to review the 2024 gardening year this is typically a video i would be filming outside of my garden but it's about 50 degrees today and quite windy and that does not sound that nice to be sitting in i am someone who loves warmth in the moment it starts to get cold all i want to do is be bundled up and indoors so i'm just going to sit right here we're going to review all things the 2024 garden i have a handful of categories that i'm going to kind of break everything up in but this is something i love to do at the end of the year i've done this for a few years now where i kind of just discuss the gardening year the timeline of the year how things went things that disappointed me and kind of everything in between i'm going to grab my notebook here this has a bunch of different notes that i have written throughout the year i'm sure i have lost track of a few things but this is going to just help me summarize everything up so one thing i did want to start with is typically our first average frost around here is about that third to fourth week of october and our first last frost is typically about that third week of april for me i like to wait to plant any of my frost tender things out until that first week of may that being said this was probably one of my best gardening years yet this was year seven for me and honestly i changed a few things up in the garden this year and i really feel like it made such a difference on top of that we had a really just good weather year we were warm and hot but we weren't having extreme pockets of hot like we've had in previous years and we were very lucky in that aspect and we also were a little bit rainier i feel like or more consistent in rain in those beginning months so categories today for this is what did i do differently in 2024 that will be our first one then i'm going to go into my seed starting and planting schedule and kind of how things went in and out of the garden that way you can get a better idea of my timeline especially if you are in a similar area to me i'll give you all of my planting dates on that and then i'm also going to talk about what did well what didn't do well what exceeded my expectations what didn't and then i'm going to jump into what i was able to kind of preserve out of the garden i definitely do not have full numbers on this because we have eight through a handful of things but i did at least list different things i was able to preserve and then what would i do differently in 2025 and what am i going to do the same so that being said let's jump into the first category which is what did i do differently in 2024 the first three things on this list i really feel like made majority of the difference this year when it comes to the garden so one of the first things i really did differently in the 2024 year is i was really trying to make sure i timed out my seedlings perfectly this is something that's been very difficult for me over the years i would get really close or do really well on a few things and there'd be a few other things that either i started a little bit too early or too late this year i really feel like i got a really good sweet spot on almost everything i really liked my seed starting schedule i was starting about a handful of seeds about every week every two weeks once uh february got here i did start a few things earlier than that though which we will discuss but my seed starting schedule overall was significantly better this year i didn't have any super large starts at all everything was really uniform really beautiful like i had beautiful starts and that kind of leads me into my second point which is i was feeding my seedlings very early on and i was also doing foliar feedings this year with fish and seaweed fertilizer so i pretty much fed my seedlings with the fish and seaweed fertilizer only um and they looked so good these were probably some of my best seed starts like i just said and then this year was the year i started to incorporate foliar feeds throughout my garden which with the fish and seaweed fertilizer you are able to use that every 10 to 14 days and i was on a fertilizing schedule every 10 to 14 days pretty much since mid-february until about august i got a little lazy in august which i could have been a little bit better about uh which i will probably make that as a note for next year i just got a little bit lazy once like preserving got super crazy but i was feeding my plants about every 10 to 14 days with fish and seaweed fertilizer and i will say i also do soil testing but that made such a huge difference in my garden the foliar feeds especially like i've never done foliar feeds before in a foliar feed your um your plant is able to absorb the nutrients through their leaves and not having to absorb it through the soil so i i don't know i really enjoyed that i think it made a huge difference another thing i did this year that made a really big difference i feel is a filter on my this is something i have never done but we got a filter for the hose and if you did not know most of the time your treated water has chlorine in it and chlorine can actually kill the micro organisms in the soil and the filter can also remove heavy metals and things like that that could end up in your garden and i feel like my plants overall this year were just significantly healthier um i will know a little bit more next year because i'm planning on doing both those things again every gardening year is different so i'll be really interested to see how this continues on but those two things i feel like just made a huge difference in my garden this year my garden was really much it was just thriving the other thing i really decided to do this year was try to cut back on how much i was cramming things into spaces i obviously don't have a small garden but i also don't have a large garden i am limited in what i can grow and in years past i was trying to fit as much as possible and i was really going toward the small like end scale when it comes to spacing like say something needed about eight to twelve inches i was planting it eight inches and not really giving it any row space either so then i felt like i was having more disease problems because i wasn't having enough airflow just because everything was so packed in so this year i made a very cautious effort to kind of just space things a little bit better or row space things a bit better and one thing i did especially with the garlic and the onions is this was the first year i planted eight inches apart for the garlic and then with the onions i did eight inches apart with 10 inch rows and i had such beautiful harvest of garlic and onions very uniform very large um so i think that also made a really big role just because you're also not fighting for nutrients when things are a little bit more spaced out a few other things i did differently this year was i potted up my extra seed start so i actually started out probably i think like six or seven extra pepper plants for example and this was just because i like to plant out a few extras in case a few of my starts don't look good i can be a little bit choosy on what gets planted in my garden but this year i was like you know what i'm gonna pot these up after i got done planting out the garden in may i potted up all of my extra plants and i kept them under my seed starting lights and i really liked that because what happened was i harvested my garlic for example i typically am able to harvest my garlic that second week of june and once all of that stuff came out of the garden i was actually able to plant a second round of peppers and those peppers gave me a good amount of peppers and i started those peppers in february so i did up pot them to a five six inch pot after may and it did really well so that is something i'm definitely going to do again another thing kind of on that note as far as like another thing with like seed starting is if you're like with onion seedlings i have started them all different kinds of ways i've cluster sowed them i've done a few um seeds per block and kind of separated them as i planted them out this year i was very tedious on planting one seed per soil block that was game changer at planting because i wasn't spending so much extra time at planting pulling plants apart i also felt like since i wasn't pulling plants apart and disturbing the roots even though onions have really strong roots i wasn't disturbing root systems and my onions were able to get established a lot quicker which i think made a huge difference when we ended up having a really fluke cold snap which we will also talk about in a little bit but when it comes to planting onions it's kind of like garlic and if you've never done both it's kind of tedious you are planting out a ton of different holes but with onions you also can't plant them too deep um you have to be really cautious of how much you're planting them down because that's going to affect their bolts especially with like their roots and stuff so it's just very tedious so for me to be able to take out some of that extra time of really messing with the onion plants and just being able to plop a soil block into the soil it was game changer and i will forever be sowing my onions like that for now on i overall just had better succession sowing i feel like that just comes with being more knowledgeable in the garden so another thing i did was i did a lot more preserving as i went i didn't wait to do a huge tomato processing day at the very end typically i would freeze a bunch of my tomatoes and do it at the end still have some tomatoes in there but i did my tomatoes throughout which was a lot of work but felt so good and then last but not least i did pull beans i have to say i love this so much there's a few different reasons for that as well so i love my trellises and one thing is green beans grow very very quickly so my trellises this year were just a lot fuller a lot quicker because the green beans grew so quick and the trellis got filled up a lot faster which i loved because my trellis space also gives me a lot of privacy amongst neighbors in the backyard there so that was just something i really loved the other thing i really liked is i was able to get my first wave of green beans in so if you didn't know green beans are a little bit finicky with heat and extreme sun and this is something i've had issues with with trying to plant them out mid-summer even though green beans are a really quick crop i've noticed for me they do better in the fall and in the spring and with the pool variety you can keep them in like i planted out my pull bean seeds i want to say it was either i think i have it written down here somewhere may 1st may 2nd and those lived into in my garden up until about what a week ago or so when i ripped them out and what happened was i got really good harvest for like the end of june into july things slowed down um through august like end of july into august and then when september hit again and we kind of cooled back down a little bit um i was able to get a whole separate second like wave of green beans to where i have a good amount of green beans in the freezer really enjoy that because i've done a lot of bush beans in the past and they also just take up a lot of space um so maybe i've been converted and i will be growing pool beans for now on okay so i typically get a lot of questions when it comes to my seed starting timeline when i'm planting things out when i'm harvesting things out so i went through and i made sure i had dates for a lot of different things um this might be like one of those things that might be kind of boring so feel free to skip ahead but i find things like this to be interesting especially as someone who really didn't know much about gardening at least this way you can get a better visual for my timeline so the very first things for the 2024 garden that went into the ground was actually october 28th of 2023 and that is when i planted my garlic after that i started my onion seeds december 31st of 2023 inside under my lights i grew a variety called calibra this year which is a variety i also grew last year i really like that variety a lot and then we pretty much skipped the entire month of january which i do feel like this next year i'll probably plant my sweet potatoes um in january i might like bump them up a week or two but as of february 8th of 2024 i got more seeds started with broccoli cabbage kale collards lettuce rosemary lavender and i also started my sweet potatoes that week as well and then the following week on february 13th i started all my peppers so this year i had eight different varieties and i really wanted to make a note of this so last year i was very much disappointed in the cayenne variety i grew i grew a variety called red rocket last year and it was very thin walled and really hard to work with especially to de-seed to make any type of cayenne powder so this year i was on the lookout for more of a thicker walled cayenne and i loved the variety i grew so much this year it was a hybrid from johnny's called red ember and the flesh on it is pretty much just as thick as i would say about a like a jalapeno it's very similar to the paprika peppers that i grow the hungarian magars which we'll go ahead and cross that off the list um i really enjoy them they dried beautifully the walls were thicker very easy to de-seed i will definitely be growing those again i grew classic jalapenos classic banana peppers i do not remember my bell pepper variety um i need to try to figure that out because those actually did really well for me this year um i also did a snacking pepper this year which is a hybrid from johnny's as well and i really liked these you know that variety bag you can get at the grocery store that has yellow orange and red little peppers that you can snack on that's what i grew so i did buy a variety pack but i apparently only grew orange ones for some reason i was a made the most beautiful powder as well i freeze dried a bunch at the very end and i love this powder so much i've been tossing it into rice to make seasoned rice and it's so good and the color on it's so beautiful so i really liked those i'll probably be growing those again i grew classic serranos and then poblanos which um we'll talk about in a little bit on february 21st 2024 i planted my snap dragons march 4th of 2024 my onions and poppies were planted in the garden this is right around six weeks before my average last frost but i really like the six weeks out from my average frost for onions i've done this the last two years i really liked it poppies did really well being planted they also they kind of need that cold stratification so really liked that they got planted in the ground march 4th which is pretty early as far as planting things in the ground march 6th of 2024 um i seed started some dahlias hibiscus and oregano down in my basement on march 13th we got luffa basil lemon basil parsley echinacea all started inside and then i also direct sowed my spinach outside and all of my cool weather crops um got planted as well so my broccoli got planted outside my lettuce got planted outside cabbage kale collards they all got planted march 13th so on march 20th my tomatoes got started i started a second round of lettuce and then i also started mint and hyssop so this year i planted my tomatoes roughly five weeks out before they were getting planted in the ground and i have to say i really feel like that was a sweet spot they really weren't too big and i really enjoy that tomatoes can be one of those things when you're seed starting that honestly can kind of be a pain especially if you start them just slightly too early tomatoes grow so fast for example i started by peppers february 13th and i did not start my tomatoes until five weeks after i started my peppers so and they were the same height when they all got planted and then on march 25th and 26th we actually had a really significant hard freeze which is a little bit later for us um we have had cold dips like this that very first week of march which is one of those things i keep an eye on when i'm planting out my onions but i've never experienced the cold snap we had march 25th and 26th we were in we were in the 20 degrees for over 12 hours we were having feel likes in the teens and with this multiple hard freeze i mean we had we had garlic already growing pretty significantly at that point onions were in the ground broccoli lettuce um my blueberries and strawberries they were already blooming which also was a smidge early because we were having such warm temperatures i was looking back at footage for just making notes for this video and i was wearing shorts and a t-shirt i think the week prior of this super super cold snap we got so i covered everything with frost fabric even my garlic which i typically wouldn't have done but we ended up having ice and sleet at the very front of this cold snap it wasn't like it was just a cold snap we also had a lot of moisture and i didn't want anything to get ice or frost damage that way especially with the garlic already growing so significantly at that point and i ended up having some damage um even with having the frost fabric because some of the frost fabric ended up blowing up because it was super windy and my onions got really damaged um and i think this was probably the start of just the onions probably not doing as well as i actually thought they did which we will discuss as well that cold snap um it damaged a few things everything did fairly well though like i lost a few leaves on the broccoli and the lettuce but everything snapped back and it was completely fine so i did truly learn how much things can handle i feel like if my frost fabric didn't fly off the onions i probably wouldn't have had so much damage on those um but i did learn how much plants can take i might try to plant out like a few like extra greens or something just as an experiment because we have had like warmer you watch this year will be like the cold year than like the snow year on march 28th i planted carrots outside and then i really didn't plant out anything else until april 25th which was about a week before i planted everything else i just planted out my snapdragons and dahlias and then all of my frost tender stuff got planted out on may 1st and may 2nd so i also direct so things like green beans this day honeydew this day cantaloupe this day did i direct so anything else i feel like i direct so sunflowers at the end of may may 28th all of my broccoli got harvested it was so beautiful this year i've been planting a variety called bell star and i really like it because it's more stress resistant and we have very crazy fluctuating temperatures here where one day it can be pretty cold the next day it's significantly warm and those ups and downs can really play with broccoli i've had a lot of issues in the past with a lot of broccoli varieties but the bell star has proven to be wonderful for me i planted out my sweet potato slips on may 31st i really held back on those because sweet potatoes don't like cold whatsoever and then on june 7th my garlic was harvested this was my best garlic harvest yet i have to say such beautiful heads of garlic they were gorgeous and again this is where those foliar feeds really come into play this was the year i decided to do foliar feeds mostly for the garlic and i just decided to start doing it with a lot of the stuff and beautiful garlic so good june 10th and 12th after i got all of that garlic harvested corn okra and zucchini and also those peppers i mentioned all went and got planted in place of where that garlic is so that can kind of show you how i'm getting multiple waves of stuff out of these beds the garlic was done for me beginning of summer and then that corn oh that corn was so good this was also the first year i was really successful with corn um and that was great timing i really liked timing that with the okra and the corn i'll probably be doing that again next year um and then let's see mid-june i was starting to harvest my carrots at that point i had really beautiful carrots again this year too june 28th of 2024 i was actually starting more cool weather crops already and those are the ones that are planted in my garden right now so all the broccoli cabbage um collards kale i have outside right now i started at the very end of june and that timing worked out a lot better i ended up trying to research that a little bit better this year and time that out better for a fall garden um i've had some issues in the past like just getting overwhelmed with summer and not starting my fall crops in time and then i ended up finding kind of a chart on my extension website my ag extension that broke down the timelines on a fall garden a little bit better for my area and that really helped with my seed starts on july 5th all of my onions got harvested and i have to say these onions were beautiful they were the best onions i ever grew and if you know you know they were so beautiful we'll talk about that in a second the end of july i started harvesting all of my melons um i will say i absolutely hated my honeydew variety i was really excited about honeydew this year um i really need to look up the variety i grew i think it was called sweet something i don't know i hated them so in 2023 i grew watermelon and watermelon's also very tricky so there's melons that slip and there's melons that don't slip and all that means is they naturally slip off the vine which cantaloupe naturally slips off the vine i love growing cantaloupe it's so beginner friendly if you're trying to find a melon find a cantaloupe variety my favorite is how's jumbo or hail's jumbo however you want to pronounce it i hated the honeydew variety i did have someone comment on one of my videos that johnny's has a hybrid honeydew that naturally slips that i might try but for me being in a smaller space like i am if i'm not going to be i don't know maybe i just need to research picking it more but like even with watermelon they were just so tricky because there's tricks with the tendril you can watch color changes you can watch and i don't know the honeydew was just not the texture i really enjoyed like the cantaloupe has such a beautiful texture i don't know i just really was not a fan and honeydew has always been my favorite melon so very disappointed about in august see i told you you would find out pretty quick so four weeks after um i harvested my beautiful onion crop i lost my entire onion crop for the most part i think i was able to get like 20 to 30 onions but what happened was i cured them the same way i've cured onions in the past and i ended up going outside i was using these onions throughout the time span of them curing in my garage and week three no issue and then week four i was going to start cleaning them up to put them down in the basement and i noticed black mold and then within inspecting everything further pretty much the rest of my harvest got knocked out by this black mold i'm telling you like there was so much black mold in these onions which was so disappointing because these onions were so big and beautiful and the thing i ended up figuring out that was probably the issue i had a lot of people say that they had similar issues to me um in kansas so we had a ton of wind damage and that's something i will talk about in a little bit so we had a lot of wind i had a lot of green breakage and when that can happen like things can get in that you don't want them to get in and things don't really show up until you start curing and things i don't know it was really disappointing unfortunately i feel like i'm gonna have a little bit anxiety going into the onion harvest this next year and maybe i just need to do a few things differently one of the things i'll talk about is my plan to do things differently i don't really know what i'm gonna do quite yet but i did end up losing my entire onion harvest which was devastating it was one of the things this year that didn't do well this year was overall an amazing gardening year but that was a really bummer loss so also beginning of august i started harvesting luffa i planted out my fall crops um the first week of august so my fall crops were only inside for about five weeks or so and then i harvested my sweet potatoes on september 27th obviously throughout like the entirety of summer i was harvesting a ton of tomatoes i was harvesting a ton of peppers those things that you're constantly harvesting i was harvesting throughout the summer and then i planted out my garlic on halloween this year which is a little bit later than last year speaking of some of the timeline things i kind of got into some of this already but what did well what didn't do well so let's talk about things that didn't do well first which elderberry this was my second year for elderberry and i was very disappointed they did put on berries so i have two separate elderberry plants they are supposed to cross pollinate each other and i did get berries this year but i didn't get a lot of berries they really didn't bloom that much so i don't really know i don't know i gotta research that one more so my cabbage and my collards so the cabbage i have out there right now i feel like is rebounding quite well the cabbage i grew in the spring i didn't even plant out i don't know what was going on so typically if my seed starts don't look that great i just don't plant them out and i i want to say i planted like eight to ten cabbage plants and there was not one that looked worth planting so i just did not plant them in the spring um as far as collards go those just mostly got attacked by cabbage moss i don't know what it is but they really like collards for some reason um and i just have found those to be a little bit trickier in the space i feel like one thing i need to do a little bit differently which i keep just going on to like extra topics but i need to reset up an area where i just have insect netting up because i had that in my garden years ago and it made a huge difference and the last thing that i that really didn't do well were my poblanos they did well but i hated the variety i grew i don't know what it was the flavor was not good they were small i did not enjoy them at all i honestly didn't really do much with them at all i did try to powder them down i tried to make a like a sauce with them i didn't like anything i did with them i did not like them all right what did well honestly almost everything did pretty decently this year which again i had one of my best years so i can't complain about anything it was my best tomato year my best garlic year so those two things made me super happy one of those weeks i processed over 100 pounds of tomatoes just in one week and that wasn't anything else either which was absolutely insane um my hibiscus ended up doing really good i grew hibiscus this year for tea i grew a variety called zinger and at first when i was seed starting my seed starts looked terrible like i don't know what was going on they were the one seed starts that were just like not doing it for me they weren't doing well they were yellow most the time they weren't green and i was like i have no idea what's going on with these but i still planted them all out and they all did very well so i don't know that was a weird one at first but the hibiscus ended up doing well corn this was the first year i was successful with corn so sweet corn has always been tricky um sweet corn you have to grow kind of like in a box because they all pollinate each other and one thing i did in the past was i really didn't do that i would plant them in a few rows but that wasn't significant enough um having them like in a whole bed like i did i think really helped i also um hand pollinated them myself i was feeding them quite often corn is a really heavy feeder and i was successful with corn it tasted so good i loved it so much okra was great this year i think it's mostly because i planted it in one of my sunniest locations and years past i've tried to stick it in wherever i could find and honestly never had that great of an okra year but this year i was able to get a decent amount pickled um i would have got more pickled but then i couldn't find vinegar pretty much anywhere and then cantaloupe this was my best cantaloupe year yet um i did plant out more plants but i had such beautiful cantaloupe i was getting cantaloupe pretty much non-stop from july through october and we pretty much had a minimum of about three to four a week they they were just coming they tasted so good loved them so much as far as what i was able to preserve out of the garden obviously this is just what i was able to put back in my pantry this isn't anything we ate fresh i also don't have exact numbers kind of like i mentioned in the beginning but i honestly was able to put away all sorts of different things this year i also still have one more round of tomatoes and garlic i need to process i will be doing that next week so these numbers aren't exact but this is what i currently have um downstairs like i said i've already had to get out a good amount of salsa and crushed tomatoes so as far as canned stuff i was able to get tomato sauce i really think i got a year's worth of salsa and probably a year's worth of crushed tomatoes down there very very excited about those i also was able to pickle okra pickled peppers jalapeno jelly as far as like things i freeze dried i have cantaloupe carrots peppers i made into different powders i chopped them i can easily toss them into things with some of those onions i was able to uh keep i made onion powder i also have some chopped onions garlic powder tons of herbs uh garlic scapes chopped strawberries i also dried a ton of lavender and luffa i freezed a bunch of broccoli and green beans so this was the year i got a year's worth of a handful of things i can honestly say i feel like i got a year's worth of these things um paprika powder was definitely one cayenne powder i really think salsa crushed tomatoes we definitely did we got pickled peppers probably a year's worth of those honestly we probably have a year's worth of carrots as well um which is really really exciting um with this year being so abundant i was able to put back significantly more than i have been in the past and to be able to get that many jars of salsa alone that has been a goal for a while which makes me super super happy what do i plan to do differently in 2025 and what do i plan to do the same so obviously one of the first things i really need to kind of figure out um going into the 2025 year is what do i want to do as far as like a wind block solution for the onions if you have any ideas for this please let me know i did think about potentially getting um what they use for flowers as far as like the flower netting to where they can grow up but then i worry that that wouldn't work so well when the onions start to flop over i don't know if that would necessarily work i just need to figure out a way where maybe i can block some of the wind gusts that my onions might get because i want to try to prevent as much breakage as possible it really wasn't such an issue in 2023 because we were significantly drier and i really do feel like the made this more of a problem this year if you have any ideas please let me know um i would like to try to add at least one garden bed maybe two i really don't really have the room i do have area i do have one area i could add one more garden bed but i would have to remove my perennial area i have a viaro in echinacea and i don't know if i really want to do that but i could get so much more with one more garden bed so i don't know that's kind of an up in the air thing definitely a new compost area i'm currently trying to make my plans right now on a few things um i am going to make the trellis tunnel a little bit longer i did remove my front trellis that i had this year um because that's where i planted out the garlic so regardless the trellis tunnel is going to be longer and i also um might make it wrap i don't know i thought wrapping it kind of would give me a little bit more privacy as well so i don't know i'm playing around with a few ideas there i would like to try to incorporate more insect netting and frost fabric just to make my life a little bit easier and maybe extend my garden a little bit i would obviously love to have a greenhouse but i don't know if that's something i'll really be able to manage in my current space but i would like to at least try to challenge myself a little bit on extending my garden a little bit more or playing around with a few different like techniques with that and then i'm also thinking i need to research some dwarf variety of fruit trees so i was able to get some massive garden planters that i think would actually work pretty well for dwarf trees so i'm thinking i really want to try to find a few that maybe i could plant this year um strawberries i ripped out all of my strawberries last week um and i have a lot of them planted in my basement under lights at the moment and they're doing quite well i saved a lot of my younger plants but i want to reset my strawberries to where i don't know for sure if i really want to plant those out in any particular area i don't know if i want to get new varieties i'll probably plant those strawberries out anywhere regardless i don't know the strawberries are kind of up in the air if you have a favorite variety please leave that down below for me my problem with the strawberries is i just haven't been able to grow as much as i would like and i think that's just due to how much i'm able to actually grow and then a few things i am going to do the same in 2025 is i'm going to continue to soil test i think soil testing makes a huge difference because you don't want to add any nutrients that you don't need i think ph plays a huge role again you don't want to throw any nutrients in there that you don't need so i think soil testing makes a huge difference even if you just do an at home test foliar feeds i really am going to keep up on the foliar feeds and i'm also going to keep up with fish and seaweed fertilizer i really really liked that and then i'm also going to keep the filter on my hose but guys that kind of breaks down the garden in a whole for 2024 it was a great year for me and i don't really have complaints outside of losing my onion harvest that was honestly quite devastating but such a learning curve as well overall though i am very happy with how this year went i hope you guys enjoyed following along thank you guys so much for being here as we reviewed the 2024 year i will see you guys all in the next one bye