assessments

despite the cucumbers' continuing production...and the still popping peppers...and the seemingly endlessly green bed of spuds...and the potato fruits the continue to produce...and the brussels sprouts that are trying to recover from being eaten as greens by some critter or another...the jerusalem artichokes, and even the foliage on the still producing cucumbers tells me the season is winding down...coming to an end (or, at least, moving indoors in a truncated form )...and i suppose it is human nature as things wind down to want to look back and hash over what has happened....what went right...what went wrong...what was accomplished..what wasn't...we had successes...the green manure project seems to have paid off...the plants seemed to produce well...the few i test harvested certainly did well...the potato plant i took yielded a bit over three pounds of tubers if i remember rightly...that compares well with industrial yields per plant...i din't harvest much so i have no idea what the quantities produced were...no weights...no measures...only a few things to go on but they did well...i still have a couple of potato plants in my bed to look at...i hesitate to count in the jerusalem artichokes...natives and invasive the almost always produce significant numbers of tubers..but on the whole i think this was a success...i am disappointed in the lack of any real establishment of a community...we need to find a way to include people that makes them feel they have a real stake in the garden...want to participate...we provided produce to the neighborhood...nothing wrong with that...but that doesn't make the neighborhood into a community or part of the garden...everybody likes free stuff...but none of this was free...there is still a lot of work to do in this if this garden is to succeed...i don't doubt that i will be writing a more detailed assessment and passing it on...i am trying to curb my disappointment in this area...keep it from overwhelming the whole picture..there needs to be some work done there too.