Welcome to Our Garden

Welcome to our garden

The garden in June

We get about 3 months of solid growing time up here.  Planning and getting our vegetables in the ground as soon as we can is pretty important if we want to capitalize on the quantity of produce we try to grow.  Everything that is planted in our garden has been started from seed in our greenhouse or direct sown. Items such as leeks and green onions are started in the greenhouse as early as March.  Peppers and tomatoes are started in April and then in May we start our squash and cucumbers.  Everything is transplanted into the garden the second week in June.  We always have the potential for frost in early June, so we keep plenty of row covers available to cover our crops.

The garden in August

We grow over 60 different vegetables and fruits, with multiple varieties of some items.  Last year we harvested around 700 pounds of tomatoes! This year we are anticipating over 1200 pounds of tomatoes! We will be able to provide our CSA customers with canning tomatoes and hope to find others that are interested in purchasing tomatoes by the bushel.

I see sauerkraut in my future

September is a busy month for putting up our food for the winter.  We have already made several kinds of pickles, zucchini relish and have canned corn that was given to us by a neighbor.  We were given a large crock to use in our attempt to make sauerkraut.  It looks pretty easy from my research.  The most important variable seems to be keeping the temperature consistent during the fermenting process.

Freezing is our other way of putting up our food. Freezer space is running low though, so I'll have to get creative.  I just purchased a large food dehydrator so I'll have to delve into a new way of processing our food.  I've read that dehydrating actually retains more nutrients that freezing or canning. I'm sure I'll be posting something about dehydrating once I figure out how to use it!

August Harvest

Goddess Cantaloupe and Moon & Stars watermelon