Longer than I realized – I thought I had posted something this past summer, but 2023 was a whirlwind year for me. Not in the best way. My garden was planted, but didn’t do very well. A big reason was because I had ongoing health problems – hospitalized with pneumonia in June of 2023. I was better but not fully recovered, and we went on vacation to England in July (my husband is from there and hadn’t been home in 12 years or so) and I was hospitalized there with the same pneumonia. We got home, and I got a new doctor – she sent me to get more testing – turns out along with the pneumonia I had cardiomyopathy – essentially congestive heart failure. I’m doing a lot better now that I’ve gotten proper treatment and the correct medications. I didn’t have the energy or ability to do a lot of garden maintenance for most of the summer, and didn’t start feeling more normal till about mid September.

The weather was another reason the garden crapped out. We had lots of rain, and lots and lots of slugs. I was trying to grow giant pumpkins – I bought seeds specifically for those award winning giant pumpkins, figuring I would try to grow one or two in the middle of the garden, to keep them away from deer. I got one pumpkin that was almost to about grapefruit sized, and one day I went to check on it and it was being eaten on the bottom by slugs. This was the second year of lots of slugs – I had noticed the year before they were just wandering around in the yard – I was seeing them everywhere, not just in the garden In fall of 2022, I put in a King Stropharia bed (edible Wine cap mushrooms) – I got fruiting mushrooms in 2023, and we harvested some nice mushrooms:

Then the slugs came. They would eat the mushrooms before they even could pop out of the ground. I’d find holes where they were starting to fruit, and also half eaten full mushrooms. I essentially grew a slug smorgasbord. I will be doing some super slug prevention this coming year. 

We did have some garden successes for 2023. I got lots of good garlic, enough to eat and to plant more for next year. I got a decent crop of onions. A few nice sunflowers. A few tomatoes. Our grapevine got huge and gave us a ton of grapes. I found that if I leave them on the vine till after it frosts, they actually are sweet.

2023 also came with changes to our household. We added a couple more puppies – we still have Downey, but he’s about 14 years old, and not very active anymore. We added Onyx, a black labrador retriever; and Lobo, a mixed-breed puppy (that looks like a yellow lab, but he’s a mix of 3 or 4 different things).

We also lost our rabbit, Buddy, in late 2023. He was the last holdout of our rabbit farming from a few years ago, and he was a nice pet. He lived to about 8 or 9 years old.

2023 was a crazy year. Sorry for being away for so long. I plan on doing more gardening in the coming year, and will hopefully have some nice stories and photos to post on here.