First Garden

There are SO many things that I would like to post, but I should first describe the condition of my garden.

• Size - 35x35 on a slight hill. I have sectioned out about 13 small beds.
• Location - not so great - Zone 6b, surrounded by lots of trees and one giant Black walnut tree down hill but pretty close to the garden.
• Sun - About 5-6 hours of direct sun a day - again not ideal, but it's the sunniest spot we have.
• Soil - Dense, mostly clay, very rocky, freshly dug up, did not amend much except for several buckets of manure.
• List of things I have been trying to grow: Cabbages, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Lettuces, Peas, Radishes, Green and Yellow beans, Hard beans, Peanuts, Herbs, Hot peppers, sweet peppers, Zucchini, Winter Squashes, Melons, Onions, Beets, Leeks, Carrots, Potatoes, Cucumbers, Tomatoes, Asian greens, Celery, Fennel, Chicory, Kale, Swiss Chard, Spinach, Soy beans, potted citrus plants and berry plants...I'm sure I'm missing something

So as you can see, it's not an ideal condition, and we are over ambitious with the list. But, we are trying to make the best of it. We keep saying, "it's only our first year." It's true, we have to examine which vegetables work and which don't, how much sun we get, how our soil holds up etc. etc. When we first dug up the plot, we thought we would just plant the seeds in the ground and all of these vegetables will grow magically - just like our grandparents did, and we'd have 100lb of tomatoes.

NOT!

We keep getting all sorts of diseases and pests, and constantly battling against them. Some things such as peas, beans, lettuces, and asian greens have done very well. So it's not all a bust, but our most anticipated things like Tomatoes and cucumbers are struggling. I will post about them in separate posts.

Soil test would have helped tremendously. I don't know why we didn't think of doing it at the beginning of the season, as if our soil somehow had all the nutrients and minerals. After seeing some problems, we did one of those home soil test kits and found out that we basically have no phosphorus or potash. Of course, those things are not 100% reliable, it explains some things. We will send our soil sample to a university for more accurate testing.