This will probably be my last in depth comparison post because most of the plants have reached their terminal growth and have entered into fruit production mode and the differences from here on out will simply be in harvest. Even that will be quite obvious as a stunted plant is just not going to produce the same as a well fed huge healthy plant.
There really is nothing more to say about this picture, the second year garden (Est. March 2015 to the right) is so green, tall, dense and productive. Year 1 (Est. Feb 2016 to the left) of the items that are also planted on the right tomatoes, squash, beans, corn, onions, peppers: the plants are all stunted, yellowed, and any fruits are small and under developed.
Year 2, We had some really severe weather the last two weeks, I lost one of my zucchini plants. The huge leaves just caught the wind like sails and it broke the vine. The remaining plant is still putting out male flowers and seems healthy. I left it there to see if it would start to produce another main vine stem. The remaining zucchini plant is putting out plenty of fruit so I'm certainly not crying for lack of zucchini.
All my trellis systems have fared very well during the high wind and rain storms. I'll never trellis another way again, I've found my perfect system. The tomatoes seem to have stopped growing up so much at about 5 ft. The cucumbers are still vining high at over 6 ft. They'll continue to fill out the trellis I'm sure. The 8 week corn has tasseled and the silks have emerged. It's amazing on the Year 2 side the stalks are over 5 ft. I haven't seem double silks though so I may have not quite thinned out the corn enough to get two ears per stalk, but there will still be plenty of corn. The stalks on the Year 1 side are about 2 ft and have little or no silk emergence.
Year 1. Just really pitiful looking. I did give a few tomatoes and corn some chemical fertilizer feedings to see what would happen and they greened up and grew a bit above their non fed counterparts, but not enough to compare to the no feeding required on the year 2 side. It's starting to get pretty hot during the day so I have more or less only been going out to harvest now.
This harvest was from about a week ago. The beginning of what was to come.
This is from this morning. To date I have harvested (all from the year 2 side..year 1 has yet to produce any fruits of harvestable quality):
15 slicing cucumbers (these plants were started indoors, so they had a head start),
4 pickling cucumbers (these plants were started from seed in the ground),
10 LARGE zucchini
11 yellow crookneck squash
3 lbs of green beans
2 bell peppers
We'd been grazing on cucumbers for about 2 weeks but the first real harvest started just last week when we returned from camping. So almost all of the above has just been in the last 7 days.
Amazing. I LOVE my garden.
