Homegrown

I worked as a gardener back when we lived in the city - but aside from small herb gardens and container cherry tomatoes, I never really had the opportunity to grow any food. Last Winter, I wrote in an early post about all the seeds we had ordered for our very first vegetable garden. It almost seemed like a dream at that time, with snow on the ground and a fire in the wood stove.

With the help of some very helpful books, we planned and "designed" our gardens and got to work starting seedlings indoors. It was difficult to find enough window space with adequate sunlight to get these little plants going. I had to bring tables up into the guest rooms to accommodate the many flats we had set up.

The seeds that were started indoors were leeks, tomatoes, peppers, spinach, thyme, rosemary, lavender, basil, broccoli and potatoes. Every morning, I spent about an hour spritzing the small pots with water and checking on the little seedlings' progress. Some seeds sprouted, some did not. Some seedlings survived, and some did not, but all in all, it was an exciting success!

Springtime came along and it was time to dig out the garden plots. This is where the real work began. Without any machinery, we had to remove all the sod by hand. What a thankless job. You get absolutely filthy trying to shake most of the dirt out of the grass roots and then you get stuck with all this heavy plant material that you have to dispose of. We also had to hand-till all this bare soil. We de-sodded and tilled just under 1,000 square feet of garden space. Beatrice and Charlotte kept me company and got paid in earthworms.

April came along and it was time to put some of our seedlings into the ground and plant some onion sets. The first salad greens were such a sight for sore eyes! What a delight... Our first salad consisted of lettuce, chives and radishes and I don't think I've ever tasted anything so fresh.

 

 

The garden grew and grew and we enjoyed the fruits of our labour. Stuart and I were in a constant marvel at the wondrous taste of the vegetables we grew. It is just incomparable to the taste of grocery-store bought veggies. We would often just walk by the garden and pick a spinach leaf and eat it right there on our path... the pure taste of the water of life (with a bit of dirt). 

Of course, there were some successes but also some failures. Despite being under the impression that I had used correct spacing between plants, the garden grew some more and became quite crowded!

One interesting experiment was trying to grow food completely naturally - no pesticides or any chemicals (organic or not). This of course led to some unwanted pests, but I told myself that there was enough for everyone and that these little guys were also the foodstuff of some other, welcome visitors. So our lettuce had holes in it. The cabbage didn't do too well despite my efforts at handpicking those horrible green cabbage worms (which I would bring over to the chickens as treats). It never really recovered from the infestation and ended up looking like lace. Our potatoes were not perfect but they were delicious. The tomatillos and ground cherries got eaten a bit by flea beetles, but they made it and bore wonderful fruit. On a particularly flea beetle busy week, I did concoct a mixture of onion juice, garlic juice, cayenne pepper and natural dish soap to spray some vulnerable plants but that's as far as I got in terms of pest management. 

What hit our garden the worse were the incessant thunderstorms that plagued our Summer. The 6-foot tall tomato plants got flattened more times than I care to remember. Our cucumber plants grew to satisfyingly monstrous proportions, baring hundreds of fruit-producing flowers only to be attacked by some sort of fungus just as the fruit were starting to grow. The disease killed the plants in just about a week and I only got to make two jars of pickles.

The goal of growing all this stuff was partly to enjoy it during the Summer, and partly to help us along in our attempt at a more independent, sustainable way of life. The idea was to grow enough vegetables to sustain us over the Winter. Well, I did expect that there would be pitfalls and that it would take a few years to figure out exactly how much of each veggie we consume and have to grow to reach this goal. We did quite well with the tomatoes, but we didn't grow nearly enough root and winter storage vegetables. We didn't even get to building a root cellar this Fall because aside from a few small squash (not enough compost), about 50 carrots and a few onions, we have nothing really to put in it.

When you grow more food than you can consume before it goes bad, you have to learn ways to preserve it for later use. This is where my new-found love comes in: Canning. I love canning. It kind of makes me understand how a squirrel feels, putting food away for the coming Winter. It gives me such a warm feeling inside. When we're all snowed-in, all we'll have to do is open the cupboard door and pull out a jar of crunchy dilly beans, close our eyes and be taken back to the fresh taste of Summer!

My friend Terri, who is a wonderful cook, taught me how to can. It's great to have someone to talk to and have a drink with while you spend hours chopping and dicing vegetables for relishes! I also bought a few books with recipes and got to work, making a cornucopia of canned goods: sauces (hot pepper, spicy plum, cranberry ketchup, peach and tomato ketchup), hot pepper jellies, pickles (cucumber, baby carrot, beans, onions), relishes (corn, zucchini, swiss chard), chutneys (rhubarb, peach), jams (blueberry, peach, raspberry, strawberry, blackberry), salsas (tomatillo, pear and pepper), conserves (peach, rhubarb in honey syrup, blackberries in red wine)...

I also made soups and pestos with roots, squash and leafy greens for the freezer, and froze piles of produce for later use.

The garden has now been cleaned-out and leftovers have been given to the chooks. The soil has been tilled with  manure and old straw and turned over for the Winter. The garlic bulbs have been planted. And I am waiting for our first snow, thinking about next year's garden delights.