Garden, canning, and preparedness...

So my garden didn't quite turn out the way I envisioned it. We got 1/4 of the amount of peaches that we typically get, only a handful of edible tomatoes, carrots, onions, basil, and 4 pumpkins - just in time for Halloween! Thankfully, I have many friends who had an abundance of apples, peaches and tomatoes to keep me busy this fall and to keep my shelves stocked! I've learned how to make and can applesauce, apple butter, and apple pie filling, and how to can tomatoes - an unfounded long time fear of mine. It is rewarding to see my shelves full and to know that we'll enjoy these fruits of our labor all year long.

As for gardening, I am a bit discouraged but I know that it is a long process of trial and error and work all year long. I'm starting now by adding TONS of compost and organic matter to our garden areas - leaves, as they start to fall, will be great additions. Hopefully my soil will be better and with some tweaks to our watering system - we'll have have a grand, productive garden next year (or maybe the year after that). The most important thing is that I'm trying and learning.

In the coming months, I will be posting more about a 1 year plan I intend to impliment in my area - all about becoming prepared. Each month will have specific goals and tasks as well as workshops available to anyone who is interested. I hope this becomes a valuable resource for everyone so be watching!

The prophet said to plant a garden...

How many of you remember that primary song? I used to love to sing it! Well, in the spirit of trying to learn new (and yet old) skills I attempted a garden this year. I've always used the excuse that I was pregnant or had young babies so tending to a garden was not possible. With my youngest 2 1/2 now, I figure I don't have an excuse anymore. Leave it to me to pick a year with absolutely horrible gardening weather (Hello, snow in JUNE???), and mix in a lack of soil knowledge (and well just a basic lack of any green thumb) - and well - it has been a learning adventure.

The first thing I learned is that you can plant many plants/seeds early in the spring. Things such as lettuces, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, peas, and beets can be planted in EARLY spring. If you wait, some of these plants will wilt and die in the heat (see my front yard if you are wondering...) I was really sad that I missed the window for spinach - but I can plant again in the late summer/early fall and have another window for these cool weather plants.

I learned that broccoli "bolts" or sends up its shoot of broccoli, fans out and goes to flower when it gets too hot. You can try to avoid this by keeping the soil cool (watering it frequently) during a hot spell.

I learned that my soil is very sandy and doesn't hold water very well. It defiately qualifies as "well drained" but I can't skip a day of watering my tomatoes even though they supposidly only like to be watered every few days. I also started a compost pile up in my wild hillside so that hopefully next year I'll have some nutrient rich compost to add to my soil. I'm not a huge fan of fertilizers and pesticides so I'm trying to figure out this the al natural way!

I learned that a trumpet vine attracts hummingbirds and wasps. Wasps don't eat nectar, they eat tiny bugs. Hummingbirds are VERY territorial and they guard their territory from other birds. By having this HUGE vine right by my peach tree, the hummingbirds take care of the birds that may want to eat my peaches and the wasps take care of the bugs - my peaches have been perfect and bug free (now if the frost didn't kill off 1/2 of my blossoms, we would be in good shape).

I had to replant all of my peas, carrots, and onions after the unusually cold weather we had - they just didn't germinate.

I still need to learn why people think tomatoes are so easy - mine have yet to ripen and look "healthy" but I did see some new growth today, so maybe we are finally on our way. I still need to figure out why none of my pea plants have produced a pea - I'm guessing that the deer eating the tops off of all of them is not a good thing. I've got some cantalope plants and pepper plants that aren't dead but arent' growning - I'm not sure I understand that at all - my tomatoes did that last year.

Now, for using what I am growing... I learned that you can use beet greens just like any other salad greens - and then you have the beets also. You can let carrots "winter over" in the ground and pick them in the spring - so you only have to pick what you are going to use. Onions are the same, I believe. I hope to freeze a lot of what I grow - it just tastes better that way (did you know that if you are making smoothies with greens, you can freeze your spinach and other greens - even those huge costco bags - and use them that way - your greens never need to go bad again.) I planted some zucchini - I figured this would produce something, right??? You can shred it up into a chocolate cake and it is YUMMY! I was hoping to can some tomatoes - but so far it isn't looking like a bumper crop. We ate the strawberries as we picked them. We will freeze or can our peaches. We didn't get any apricots this year (stupid weather). Our pumpkin plant will hopefully provide our jack-o-lanterns this year. There are a few other straggling plants that I'm waiting to see if they will produce.

One of my tomato plants - I bought it HUGE from Craig Fisher who started them from seed - I'm sure his look much better than mine do!

This is right behind my house (we only have 15 feet from our door to our rock wall. We are trying to make the most of every inch of space!) Here I have several tomato plants, a lavendar plant (have you ever had lavendar lemonade or lavendar sugar cookies??), cucumber seedlings and a couple of pepper plants that aren't doing much. There is also an apple tree in the background that did NOTHING this year - stupid weather.

This is carrots, onions, peas, and a huge pumpkin plant.

Some of our carrots are next to our stawberries

This is our strawberry patch.

This is Korabi (I have no idea - I'll let you know what it is and how it tastes :) ), cauliflower, broccoli, and some more tomatoes. The cauliflower doesn't look great and the broccoli keeps bolting.

This is our peach tree with the zuccini plant under it and tomatoes next to it. The trumpet vine is just to the left of the picture (I don't think you can see it)

This is down at the other end of the yard. This is our apricot tree that has no fruit on it this year, a couple of basil plants and some raspberries that aren't doing very well this year...

Interspersed, we also have some grape vines that aren't doing much, another apple tree, 2 cherry trees (that produce pit sized bitter fruit) and some various herbs.

Like I said, I'm learning and in a few years, I expect to be much better at this! :)