For all the things that went wrong this year, and for the things that did not happen, the one thing that stands out as a great success is the vegetable garden. Even though it went in late, it immediately began producing good things like lettuce and strawberries.
We have eaten and given away more cucumbers than I thought possible, with a good bit also going to waste. Green peppers, broccoli, onions, zucchini, tomatoes, more tomatoes, green beans, carrots, watermelon, and a few ears of corn round things out. Since about early July, the only vegetable we have had to buy is local sweet corn. Every day, we pick more stuff and give a good deal of it away to our friends and neighbors.
small kitchen herb garden
The herb garden is full of basil, oregano, sage, rosemary, thyme, marjoram, garlic, spearmint, peppermint, and parsley. I will harvest and dry some of these herbs to use for winter time cooking.
Every few days or so, I am making a giant vat of “garden meadly” spaghetti sauce to freeze and eat over the winter. We may start freezing green beens and carrots as well. I also made seven jars of dill pickles. I would have made more but we ran out of canning jars. The fruit trees are producing a bumper crop of pears and we picked several bunches of grapes off of the grape vines.
grapes on the vine
The best part, everything is really fresh and yummy. I don’t need to worry about salmonella, e-colli, pesticides, fertilizers, chemicals or anything else. I know exactly what I put into the vegetables and exactly where they came from.
My expendables costs are relatively low. Instead of fertilizer, I use my own compost to enrich the soil, which is free. In the spring time, I probably spent $10.00 on seeds, and maybe $6.00 on plants plus another $10.00 on mulch. The mulch is all natural, undyed. It comes from a stump grinding place down the road a ways. Because of the mulch, I spent less than 30 minutes pulling weeds, total. Most of the time spent in the garden has been picking stuff and looking around for those cleaver hiding cucumbers, beans and tomatoes.
During WWII, in the US and Great Britain, Victory Gardens were maintained and grew to supply 40 percent of all vegetable produce consumed nationally. Back yard plots reduced the pressure on farmers and allowed them to provide for the war effort. These days it certainly cuts down on transportation costs as well as all the electricity needed to refrigerate the produce while warehousing, transporting, and selling.
I also like the garden because the kids get to take part in growing and learning about where our food comes from. I think that this will be important in the future.
Popularity: 7% [?]
subscribe
How about growing some hopps for your beer?
Jeff, That is in the works for next year. You can only get hops rihizomes in March and April. I am going to build a frame for the vines if I have time this fall.
My folks had a huge garden when I was little. We had everything: string beans, corn, watermelon, potatoes, tomatoes, and tons more. I never really appreciated that garden when I was little. I was always pulling weeds. Glad yours was able to produce so much!
I am the most jealous dude in the universe.
Nothing like fresh vegetables!
The one problem that we have is everything arrives at once. For example, the cucumbers really out did themselves this year. We were getting 8-10 cucumbers a day for well over a month. We made enormous cucumber salads, made pickles until we ran out of jars, gave away cucumbers to whoever would take them and still some went to waste.
We have to plan better for preserving and/or freezing the excess so we can enjoy them through the winter too.
Paul-
Well done. We too had quite a crop this year but lost some to the animals. Perhaps I need to build a fence around ours as it visible in your first photo of this post.
I have a silly question about your compost however. We’re looking to put several piles in our yard as well however the bulk of my greens come spring and summer in the form of grass clippings (when I’m not mulching them straight into the grass) and browns in the fall as leaves. Perhaps this means our initial harvest of compost will be 18 months out? First year is piling and second year breaking down? Do you have any suggestions on this? Do you find food scraps to be enough green matter to get you through the summer?
My current thought was to experiment by adding a thin layer of leaves and grass clippings (maybe 2.5″ total) on top of a flower bed as a dressing for the winter but the hope is to build several piles in the back yard.
/dave
Hey Dave,
Regarding compost, I usually mulch my grass clippings back into the lawn as well. However, in the springtime that is not possible because the grass is too thick so they go on the compost pile. I found that after the first winter, last year’s grass and or leaves were mostly broken down into usable compost. I would say in about 6 months you should have usable material.
I occasionally find a clump of leaves or something when I am mixing the compost into the garden in the spring, but I just mix that into the soil and in a few weeks it breaks down into nice rich soil.
As far as the compost piles go, I really don’t have any scientific method, I just turn it over with a pitch fork every few months. I try to keep the older stuff separate from the newer material though as I use it throughout the growing season