It’s scape time!

June 6, 2017 In the Kitchen, Other recipes, Weekly Updates

It continues to be a funky spring. After a few blazing hot days a couple weeks ago, we’ve settled into a pretty steady stream of cool, cloudy, drizzly weather. With lows tonight forecast to go below 50 degrees, it feels more like my June in Michigan rather than our typical hot, sunny Junes in Philadelphia. However, this winter was warm enough that even with a cool spring, things are still ahead of schedule. This includes the garlic, which started producing scapes over a week ago. Garlic comes in two general varieties- hard-neck and soft-neck. You’ll notice the difference as soon as you break a head of garlic open. Hard-neck is composed of...

May 2017 Photo Shoot

May 27, 2017 Monthly Photo Shoots, Weekly Updates

The strange weather continues as we finish up an unusually cool week that immediately followed several 90+ degree days at the end of last week. Still, everything in the garden seems to be happily growing bigger and bigger with this mix of sun and rain. The first garlic scapes are emerging from the garlic plants (more on this next week) and I’m harvesting more kale than even I know what to do with!...

Looking forward

May 19, 2017 Weekly Updates

For anyone waiting with baited breath (as we were), everything has gone well so far with inspections on the farm-to-be. The soil tests came back showing everything well within normal ranges. We still have to wait for the current owner to get the well tested, but as the home has been lived in consistently, that will hopefully not present any problems. If everything continues to move forward as expected, we plan to be making our move to West Virginia by early July. One of the sad parts of making this big step forward is that we have to sell our current home and therefore our current wonderful garden. Our real estate agent recommended we...

Growing like crazy

April 21, 2017 Weekly Updates

My weather prediction has come true sooner than I expected. Although we’re continuing to get some very hot, sunny days, we’ve actually had a decent string of cool, rainy days- just what spring plants love the best. With this combo of sunshine and rain, it seems like everything in the garden has grown about a foot in the last week. The garlic, which already got a head start over the warm winter, is looking at least a month ahead of schedule and the kale and cabbage have grown big enough that I’m no longer concerned about slugs and cutworms making much of a dent in them. The carrots, spring mix, and...

At last!

April 3, 2017 Weekly Updates

We’re just back from a trip to California that really put us in the spring spirit. After seeing gardens filled with full-sized lettuce and chard, all I wanted to do was start planting! I had thought our trip was perfectly planned. We’d be able to get early spring crops like onions, spring mix, and kale into the ground before leaving and come back to an already growing garden. But winter storm “Stella” really threw a wrench in the plan and instead of leaving an already-planted garden, we left a snow-covered one and had to wait for our return to get the season going. Still, we’ve been making the most of the lovely...

Shelling beans

November 23, 2016 In the Kitchen, Other recipes

In the true homesteading spirit, I made sure to harvest every last bean off of the plants when I pulled the string beans a few weeks ago. I had mainly left the plants in the garden that long in order to allow the beans to grow big enough to produce seed for next year’s garden. However, not all of the beans on the plant had become viable seed by the time frost hit and the plants had to be pulled, so I was able to set aside a giant bag to use as soup beans instead. Whereas string beans are harvested when the pods are nearly flat and the beans inside have...

Sweeter things

November 14, 2016 Weekly Updates

With less than two weeks to go before Thanksgiving, it’s starting to both feel and look like fall in the garden. This past Friday, I finally made the call to pull out the pepper plants as temperatures were forecast to drop into the upper 20s for the weekend. Peppers and the plants they grow on cannot survive in freezing conditions, which cause their cells to burst. However, I was able to protect them from the earlier light frosts by keeping the plants shielded under a layer of floating row cover and adding on a heavy tarp on particularly cold nights. Both help keep the heat in, preventing the covered area from experiencing as...

Pulling and planting

November 6, 2016 Weekly Updates

With a steady succession of frosts every few nights, the garden is quickly becoming much more two dimensional. At this point, the three tallest crops, the eggplant, tomatoes, and beans, have been removed after getting significant frost damage. I was okay with sacrificing them to the frost before it happened, being pretty sick of harvesting tomatoes and beans by this point. But once it came to actually pulling the plants, I couldn’t help but be sad as that really does mark the beginning of the end of the season. At the start of the season, I was envisioning the garden as a source of home food, but was also planning to sell...

October Photo Shoot

October 28, 2016 Monthly Photo Shoots, Weekly Updates

We’ve had a chilly end to the month and it feels like winter is really on its way. This past week we had our first frost. I left the eggplant and tomato plants to fend for themselves. It’s good that I harvested off most of the edible fruit, as both suffered some serious frost damage to their leaves. We’re planning to start the big job of pulling them out this coming weekend. I decided to cover the peppers, which still had much more fruit on them, in order to protect them from the frost and that did the trick! We’ll be able to keep harvesting peppers for a least a little longer....

A slower time

October 12, 2016 Weekly Updates

It’s been another rough couple of weeks as I try to recuperate from yet another cold! At least this time of year isn’t the worst to be forced to take a break. During the summer, even a few days away from the garden can lead to an unmanageable amount of backed-up work. However, right now is the sweet spot of the season. It’s still warm enough that everything is producing and therefore we don’t yet need to start the big job of ripping out plants and preparing the beds for winter. At the same time, it has cooled off enough that growth has slowed on both the crops and the weeds, meaning harvesting...

Two Feet in the Dirt

microfarm

Shelling beans