No spring yet…

March 19, 2017 Weekly Updates

Well, I proclaimed March 15 the start of planting season, but March 15 has come and gone and there is nothing new in the garden. Instead, we’re still melting out from an unusually heavy late winter dumping of snow. With most of the garden beds still under several inches of icy snow, putting in spring seeds and seedlings just isn’t an option. Even after everything melts, it will still take a while for the ground to dry up enough to prepare it for planting without causing clumping and other damage to soil structure. It seems like this is always the way with mild winters- I watch the moderate temperatures all winter...

Waiting… & eating

February 18, 2017 In the Kitchen, Other recipes, Weekly Updates

Despite the recent wintery weather, it’s in the 60s today and we’re actually just a month out from the start of spring planting! By mid-March, it’s possible to get crops like onions, potatoes, and even peas, kale, and carrots into the ground. Still, early spring planting is always a complete gamble depending on the weather. I’ve had weather in March fluctuate between the 80s and heavy snow, so it’s always a guess when planning an early start to the season as to whether that will actually take place! Regardless of what the weather throws our way next month, Valentine’s Day always marks a mental turning point for me. It means that we’re through the...

Winter’s work

January 26, 2017 Weekly Updates

While we have had a few series of bone-chilling days, for the most part this winter has been milder than mild. As I mentioned, I left both carrots and spinach in the ground. Normally, it’s to be expected that the greens of both these plants will die off over the winter. With the spinach, the goal is for it to remain dormant through the cold winter days and then re-grow its tasty leaves as temperatures begin to warm in the spring. However, with temperatures regularly hitting the 50s over the last month, instead of waiting for spring I was able to get a sizable harvest of fresh spinach just yesterday. This is...

Season’s end

December 17, 2016 Weekly Updates

As we sit inside looking at the garden wintering under its bed of leaves and icy snow, now is a perfect time to reflect on and sum up the season behind us. This past year, we grew 27 different types of crops and even more different varieties within our 900 square-foot plot. We harvested over 650 pounds of produce and donated 10% of what we grew. Along with eating everything fresh, we were also able to preserve an entire pantry full of food for the winter, which we are thoroughly enjoying now! With winter upon us, we’re already looking forward to the season ahead. We are excited for the garlic, onions, potatoes, and spring roots and...

Winter’s knocking

December 9, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools, Weekly Updates

As the weather continues to cool off, things are slow in the garden, which made it easy for us to take a week away to visit family after Thanksgiving. Overall, we’ve had an pretty mild fall, but this week winter is getting real! The day after we got back from our trip, lows were forecast to drop into the 20s for the first time and that looks to be the trend for the coming week. As a result, it was officially time to do the full fall clean up in the garden. Yesterday, I harvested off everything that was left with the exception of the carrots. After doing some research, I decided...

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....

Peppers galore!

October 21, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools, Uncategorized, Weekly Updates

Fall is the time of year when most people think of harvesting greens and root crops from the garden. However, one thing that I always have a huge amount of in the fall is peppers. Because I like to harvest sweet peppers when they “color”, as opposed to what we think of as green peppers, it takes a good while for them to ripen. Therefore, I end up bringing in a majority of the harvest from mid-August onwards. And by this point, our fridge is more or less packed with peppers! Over the years, as with many other crops, I’ve narrowed my focus to growing the pepper varieties I particularly like- Carmen and...

Two Feet in the Dirt

urban farm

Shelling beans