How does your garden grow? Part 2

We are garden novices. We experimented through our first little backyard garden this year. Though we had mixed results, an experiment always yields new wisdom, yes?! Yes!

This is our garden from May that you can read about here :

And this is our garden in late July :

This is a list of what we learned, for our reference next year. It is clearly a list by and for the inexperienced gardener!

1. Zucchinis need WAY more than 2'x2' growing space. 
2. Become a weather watcher (at least a notice-er). Sometimes we need to water the garden, sometimes we don't, but it all really depends on the last three days' weather.
3. Home grown garden tomatoes are about 350% better than grocery store tomatoes. 
4. Don't plant bush green beans; plant the climbing beans.
5. When we don't have twine or string, extra teal ribbon actually works really well to tie tomato branches to their steaks...which brings me to :
6. During the month of prime growing time, tie up the tomato plants every other day (they will be growing so quickly and can't support themselves). Also, get big steaks...downed twigs won't work after a while.
7. Mortgage Lifter breed heirloom tomatoes are the winners!
8. Sometimes a red pepper plant will only produce one red pepper.
9. Plant earlier : early to middle of May.
10. Our entrenched plastic chicken-wire fence worked really well to keep out bunnies and squirrels.
11. Don't buy a veggie plant from the store that looks sickly...it likely IS sickly and may not produce a single zucchini all summer.
12. Pick tomatoes a few days before you think they are perfectly ripe (the bugs or rot could get them if you don't).

Well, that is our newly gleaned garden wisdom! I loved tending the garden this year, even if we were rather un-officious and elementary about it. More than that, I loved eating the produce...the freshness, flavor intensity, and colors were shockingly superior to grocery produce.

Until next year garden, until next year.