Veggie garden changes

I have to say that the cool season crops in my veggie garden were a big disappointment this year. I planted spinach, lettuces, broccoli, cauliflower, peas, and beets.

Because I got these plants in late and we had an early warm (ok, hot) spell before it cooled off again, I didn't get much of a harvest.

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The lettuce bolted almost immediately. The spinach just kind of sat there, then got partially eaten by a deer, then bolted.

The broccoli looks ok, but one of the three plants flowered while still a pretty small head. It has a little bit of a caterpillar issue too:

The cauliflower looks ok, but is getting chowed on by caterpillars too:

The lettuce is well past edible and needs to go:

Same for the peas:

I can't believe how quickly they went from sweet, tender, and green, to hard and yellow. I wonder what I did wrong with these?

I saw a deer in my fenced veggie garden one evening -- actually, I saw it jumping out of the garden. It ate all of my swiss chard, some spinach, and the tops of the tomato plants:

I guess I'll have to wait until next year to taste swiss chard. That's one great thing about gardening: there's always next year!

One plant that is really thriving is the agastache:

It's doing so well that I need to take it out -- it's taking up way too much space in this small garden! (It's about 5 feet tall and 3 feet wide.) So I cut it down to about 1/3 of it's height, just leaving a few leaves:

Then I yanked it out of the ground, giving me plenty of space:

I got decent rootballs, so I'm going to plant these somewhere else:

Since I took off most of the leaves, it shouldn't need very many roots, so this looks fine.

This looks like a good spot to plant:

It's just outside the veggie garden, so will still attract pollinators. Just needs a little weed clearing. The weeds are wild strawberries mostly.

It doesn't look like much, but I'm hoping they leaf out a little this year, and come back strong next year. I need to mulch this area again too.

The agastache has probably the best-smelling leaves of almost any plant I grow. Having a big armful of them to take to the compost pile really smelled fantastic!!

I missed a couple of onions last year, and they're flowering now:

I wonder if the onions are still edible, or if they used their energy producing the flowers? I don't really want to dig up the plants to see -- I like the flowers!

Although it was disappointing pulling out the run-down cool-season plants, it's exciting too, because it means I can get the rest of the warm-season plants in... but that's a post for another day.