Top Ten Garden Lessons

Top Ten Garden Tips I Learned This Year:

1: Manure makes plants VERY happy.
2: We don't like yellow summer squash as much as zucchini, so we don't need to grow much of it.
3: Sun Gold cherry tomatoes are to die for – no need to grow any other kind. They also dehydrate very nicely.
4: Amish Paste tomatoes are bigger, fleshier and tastier than Romas.
5: We really shouldn't order trees unless the ground is already ready.
6: Keeping up with the weeding early in the summer means much less weeding at the end of the summer. We did pretty well!
7: We don't need 500 mini-pumkins.
8: Paste tomatoes do NOT keep off the vine. Purple-y Russian ones and solid yellow ones do. And those solid yellow ones were sold at the grocery store after the first frost for $7.99/pound.
9: I should keep our garden notes on something like Google docs so I can find them again.
10: We use a lot of water in the summer in the desert. (OK, I already knew that)
11: One more thing - winter squash needs to be hardened off "officially" or it won't keep. Hoping it happens spontaneously doesn't guarantee it will.