Season finale must mention our pole beans

This is my final weekly column for this year’s gardening season, so a wrap-up on how my vegetable garden performed is in order.

The biggest success was growing our pole beans on arbors. The beans were much easier to pick from underneath the arbors and they made an attractive addition to the garden.

The variety we grew – Italian Snap from Seeds of Change – is by far the most productive bean we’ve ever grown. I’ve picked well over 100 pounds, with about 60 pounds going to Second Harvest Food Bank.

Some of the heirloom vegetables we grew did great and others under-performed. The large, Cinderella-style pumpkins – Rouge Vif d’Etampes – stand out with their deep orange skin and yellow stripes. They will be perfect for homemade pumpkin pies this fall.

The Winter Luxury Pie pumpkins were also very productive.

We grew five kinds of melons which was definitely over-kill for our needs. Only two varieties – Prescott Fond Blanc, with its large, wart-covered ribs, and the small watermelon, Katanya – impressed us.

The poor performers were Golden Jenny, Charentais and Early Silver Line.

The two bush-form winter squash varieties we grew – Bush Buttercup and Table Queen Bush – only produced one to two squash per plant. Gold Nugget squash grew on a compact vine and was much more prolific.

The onions I grew from seed developed well but should have been started indoors earlier. Next year, I’ll start them in February instead of March.

I encountered some puzzling problems this year. I always grow two beds of tomatoes. Even though both beds were prepared in the same way, the plants in one bed were stunted while the others grew normally.

Our fingerling potato plants were also stunted but all other crops grew prolifically. I’ll be consulting with my Master Gardener colleagues to solve those mysteries.

Now that we are harvesting the last items from our garden, it’s time to put it to bed for the winter. This includes growing cover crops in each of our raised beds.

Cover crops, which are also referred to as green manure crops, are plants like grasses and legumes that are grown over the surface of each bed in order to improve the soil’s fertility. Planted in the fall, they are turned into the soil in early spring.

You might recall that I planted cover crops in my garden last fall. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a complete success because deer kept coming into the garden and eating all the foliage off of them. Now that we have a deer fence, I will give this another try.

I have selected Austrian field peas as my cover crop this year. Because it is a legume, an inoculant should be added to the seeds in order to increase the field peas’ nitrogen-fixing qualities.

Legumes actually take nitrogen out of the air and convert it into a form that plants can take up. Inoculants can be found at local garden centers or through mail-order companies.

In addition to field peas, other cover crops include clover, hairy vetch and winter rye.

If you don’t want to try cover crops, the best thing you can do for your garden is add plenty of organic materials like compost and manure this fall. This will make spring soil preparation a breeze.

The final, most important task for all of us is to write detailed notes about how our gardens performed, so next year’s garden will be a roaring success.