Bad Year for the Garden

This year was a bad year for our garden.  We have a good crop of tomatoes and some promising rutabagas, but little else.  Not even the zucchini plants, usually prolific producers, did much.  The corn, which likes warm days and cool nights, got hot days and very warm nights.  Some local farmers were cutting their corn for silage as early as mid-August, as the cobs were not developing.

The drought and heat hit us early and hard.  There was so little rain that I didn't mow the lawn from mid-May until late August.  With the lack of rain, we could not water the garden from the rain barrel as we usually do, so it got a big dose of Mason city water, which I believe has too much chlorine for a garden to thrive.  And the heat was hard on us, but even harder on the garden.  Days in June and July stayed hot for 24 hours, not giving plants time to recover from the heat.

But why a good tomato plant and very little else?  I believe the reason was a lack of bees.  Tomatoes will self pollenate, and the fruit we have picked so far have all been on the lower stems.  The fruits and vegetables that depend on bees to thrive did very poorly.  We picked four strawberries off one box, and none off the other.  Are there fewer bees in the area due to hive collapse, as has happened around the country, or are we just too far from an established hive?  That I do not know.

As convenient as it is to live in town, I would like to move out of town where I could have a bee hive or two.  Keeping bees would not only provide a much greater opportunity for our plants to be pollenated, but would also provide us with honey, which is starting to get very expensive.

I hope next year is more productive.