Well, I have been continuing to garden and preserve food, and last year I also added studying herbalism. So despite what the blog shows, I have actually been very busy.

This year has been a weird one. As the first year of my blgo can attest, I’ve had problems with my knees for a while now. Thats’ actually how this blog got started–Feb 2021 I had a knee surgery which was was supposed to help me put off a total knee replacement. The recovery for it involved me having to keep all of my weight off of my knee for 6 weeks–right at the beginning of my first real year of gardening at my new house. I felt stymied, and poured out my frustration into the blog and a somewhat embarrassing number of excel spreadsheets.

Skip ahead to October 2024, and I finally had to have the dreaded knee replacement. It was kinda a hellish year all around, for a lot of reasons. I did plant a garden and had a successful seedling sale, but my health issues kept my involvement in my garden to much less than I would have liked. Good news is that my surgery went perfectly; I’m recovering well, and, in theory, I should be fit as a fiddle for gardening season 2025.

That said, here are some of my gardening successes in 2024:

My orchard! I now have a veritable small orchard in my .15 acre city lot. Currently I have: two peach trees (one Contender and one Reliant, both of which should be able to survive in our 5b climate); one cherry tree (Romeo, technically a bush variety); and five apple trees (Macintosh, Honeycrisp, Liberty, Arkansas Black, and Whitney–a crab apple that originated here in IL.) I believe that I also have a Cox Orange Pippin (a prized old English variety) on order; if they does end up shipping to us this year, it’ll replace the Arkansas Black, which is kind of a useless apple tree, but it was what was available when I grabbed replacement apple trees in fall of 2023.

My berries! This year my berries really stepped up–the ones planted in the ground, at least. (I’m realizing that anything I try to overwinter in a pot is just not going to be happy. And with the really dry summers we’ve been having, it’s a hassle to keep up with the watering.) The bushes that really took off this year were the Prime Ark Freedom blackberries and the Joan J raspberries. Both are cultivated thornless varieties, so they’re easy to pick. I also had an Anne Gold raspberry bush do well. I had several Double Good raspberry plants in large containers, but they did not do well this year. I’m not entirely in love with the Double Good berries–they can be very prolific, but the taste is just so-so, in my opinion–so I’m not sure if I’m going to plant them in the ground or if I use the ground space for another blackberry or Joan J plant. TBD.

My elderberries! I have two bushes (I’m blanking on the varieties, sorry) which really took off like crazy this year. Last spring they were little 1′ tall plants, which I then planted into the ground in the fall of 2023. This year, they grew a good six feet and I spent the summer trying to keep them from growing into the neighbor’s yard as well. My berry harvest was not huge, but should be enough for one good-sized batch of elderberry syrup. I have high hopes for next year’s crop.

My herbs! In generally my herbs did well this year. I grow both medicinal and culinary herbs, because buying either kind of herb in the store is outrageously expensive. For my culinary herbs, my parsley, thyme, and rosemary did quite well. (I’m still struggling to get cilantro to grow and be ready when I need it.) As for my medicinal herbs, I grew and harvested a bunch of new ones–California poppy, elecampane, skullcap–as well as old favorites such as lemon balm, comfrey, marshmallow, and lavender. I intend to expand this next year as well, just because homegrown is so much tastier and higher in the medicinal compounds than store-bought. It’s just about finding where to put them all 🙂

Well, back to dehydrating and canning. It’s mid-November now, but thanks to an extremely warm fall, my garden is still producing tomatoes….