I moved to mountain town at 5000 feet. I grew a garden this year. Worst garden I ever grew, and I'm not sure why.
I brought in a good mix of topsoil and compost, recommended by a local garden center (that seems to be well respected by the locals). And I watered enough that my water bills are really high (next year I'll look into a drip system, but there wasn't time this year). I don't think I watered too much or too little.
Nothing I planted is doing as well as it did in the 30 or so years I grew a garden in Nebraska.
Peppers are doing kind of ok, and the jalapenos seem be doing fairly well. I am getting very few Cayenne and even fewer Ghost and Habanero, but I did get some good bell peppers that ripened up nice. Not what I'm used to though.
My tomatoes got as big and bushy as what I'm used to; some are over 6'. But I am getting very few tomatoes off them. In Nebraska once they started producing I'd be bringing in a Walmart bagful every day at least and I put up a lot of salsa and made a lot of tomato powder. Here I bring in maybe one or two a day, and none at all some days. But the plants look healthy anyway.
The same goes for my cucumbers. Big long healthy looking vines with lots of yellow flowers, but just a very few cucumbers every so often. And I do see what look like little bees around them occasionally, though maybe not enough.
And it's the same for my okra, except that it doesn't look bushy and healthy; it's spindly and weak, and I had a hard time getting it to grow in the first place. I bring in one or maybe a few every few days, off several plants.
My kale is doing so so, but is not near as big as what I'm used to.
My basil plants are doing ok I guess; I made and froze enough pesto I should have it all winter.
Even the sage I planted, which I always thought of as kind of a hardy desert plant, is not doing as well as what I'm used to.
My garden is spread all over my half acre lot. Some of it is in a big deep 20' X 20' raised bed and some of it is in big pots in various places (these planters are plenty big). All of it has enough sun to be considered full sun (which is defined as at least six hours a day), but some of it has some shade various times or has light diffused through the thin foliage of a scrub Oak or Pinion Pine part of the day, while some of it has full sun all day. And I don't see a lot of difference based on location, though my full sun Jalapenos are my best Jalapenos, while my best Bells are in a place with occasional shade.
But I have managed to put up 18 quarts of salsa and about the same number of pickles (which is a fraction of what I usually put up). Since my cucumber and okra harvest is so small though I just put whatever I have in the pickle jars, so instead of a jar being all one or the other most of them are a mix, and all of them have at least a couple of jalapenos in with them. I do have some that are all Jalapenos.
I'll talk to some of the locals and see if this is typical of gardens in this area this year, and if it isn't, I'll try to figure out what I did wrong. Even the worst garden I ever had in Nebraska when I didn't know what I was doing is better than the one I had here.
Anyone here who has any ideas I'm interested in seeing them. I hadn't come back to this thread because I didn't know it would remain of interest to anyone for this long. So thanks for your interest!