Veggie Garden Update

Now that fall is here and I'm pretty sure there is going to be a frost any day now, our garden is nearing the end. The project wasn't a complete success, but wasn't a total failure either. We got a lot of tomatoes out of it which we used for a fantastic pasta sauce, salsa, BLTs and a caprese salad or two. Unfortunately, with all I planted, tomatoes were really the only thing that made it... I knew it was a bad sign when the herbs in my Aerogarden died. I originally thought I had killed everything except the tomatoes, but the pepper plants somehow made a miraculous recovery and we've gotten a couple of small green peppers off of those. I would say that the garden this year was a learning experience, and now I know of a few things to do differently next year:

1. Get better supports for the tomatoes. There was a tomato-plosion in the garden, which is good, but all the plants are falling over and take up way too much space - they needed to grow up more.
2. Plant less. I could have kept the variety of veggies, but used a few less plants. I think more would have survived this way. Before they all died to something (I blame those pesky Japanese beetles) I had 4 zuccini plants - this was way too many for the space.
3. Build a better anti-bunny fence. Ours ended up being kind of flimsy and was a pain to deal with, although we didn't have any bunny problems so it did its job.
4. Don't ignore the garden for the first few weeks after planting. I didn't really mean to do this, it just happened that we were busy many weekends early on in the summer. No excuses, though. If I had just taken 5-10 minutes a couple times a week to pull weeds and make sure the plants were supported properly and had enough space then the garden wouldn't have been such a mess.