My ambitious SPIN farm plan (above) hasn’t panned out this season. After expecting to blog every week about how my garden grows, I’ve met with, well, failure. How embarrassing.

Some things didn’t grow at all, or were quickly lost: peppers, garlic, dill, mint, pole beans, carrots, chard, beets, cavolo.

After boxing up and adding new soil to the section intended for salad — stolen by small birds and animals — the perimeter defence wasn’t good enough. The sparrows were coming in from the top. So I chicken-wired the lot!

Many tomato seedlings sprung up, so when the section intended for chard, beets, and spinach failed, I put the tomatoes in. They liked it! I feel like tomatoes can thrive anywhere. And the rocket (arugula) also did well, scattered in the plot.

A 12″ deep above-ground planter box, originally meant for carrots, was good for nothing except the two plantain weeds for my rabbits. Even when I transplanted lettuce there – capped with a glass shelf to deter the birds – it failed. All my lettuce sprouts die or get stolen wherever I transplant them, and it’s getting really frustrating that this happens.

Harvesting is underwhelming: I’ve come to admit that none of my cucurbits will be producing any squash, watermelon (they didn’t make it – it’s a mystery what happened to them), or pumpkins for me this year, except for one cucumber plant that isn’t even for pickling. I should have eaten the flowers all along. Here is the seasonal progression:

And more bad news: the beautiful cucumbers that made up for the dismal start to my backyard garden? They got cucumber wilt, a bacterial disease transmitted by cucumber beetles. I wrote a paper on it only last year. The paper is a dry synthesis of a lot of information out there. It’s useful to the organic farmer planting a good couple of rows of cucurbits.

Here are photos of my garden when the drought finally ended:

And my first fruits of the garden – not counting a handful of curly yellow beans – are these delicious cherry tomatoes. At least they’re producing a respectable harvest, and the small Roma plants, too. The parent plant is very prolific. I’m looking forward to having more of them this coming weekend, when I get back to Montreal from my parents’ in Ontario.

The cool weather has brought on more new growth. So at least there’s that.

Every day, I put the rabbits out if they show the least bit of interest. The girls usually do. Kaori is my confident lady. Elizabeth is, too, in a different way — as an escape artist that has finally understood the concept of herding. Kaori just trusts that the world isn’t that scary a place, and knows that she can do no wrong, because she hardly ever does. Except now, she’s decided to get into eating the pepper plants. Here she was chomping down on a pepper plant just as I took this photo. I picked her up and put her down in a different part of the yard.

In other garden news, the sumac that I planted last year is now about my height, and the lower leaves are beginning to change colour for fall. In addition, more wildflowers are creeping into my soon-to-be meadow.

As the growing season soon will be over, I’m planning changes so that next year is more productive. Other gardens nearby were lusher. This is what I want: a proper fence down the meridian of the front yard, and a rain barrel with a seeping hose so that I can better serve the water needs of my front garden. The back garden wants lots of compost enrichment this fall, soil testing in the spring, liming it, and getting things better prepared earlier in the season.

Thus was my 2012 garden adventure. I hope you carry on reading my adventures in cooking and other house projects through the winter!