The season has turned, from being one where we watch the tiny flowers and fruits and wonder just when they will be ready to harvest, to where I have to make several trips out of the garden with armloads of vegetables. There is a considerable shift on our table, as well. Late spring meals tend…
Category: Organic Gardening
Something new at last
I love the way vegetables sneak up on you. When you first plant the seeds, the harvest seems so vague and far away. The little plants start out so small, and for a long time it seems they will never get any bigger. Then suddenly there they are – all ready to pick, hiding away…
Onions!
Some tears were shed this week as we harvested the onions to make space for the Dudley farm corn, which will hopefully be planted this weekend. These onions are strong, and I unthinkingly rubbed one of my eyes after pulling several armfuls. We got a lot of each kind – red, white and yellow,…
Almost
Silver-spangled Seminole Pumpkin Leaves A fiery orange Cosmo blossom A ripe ground cherry (shhhh….no one else has noticed them yet) Calendula blooming Little cucumbers! I wish that I had more time to write today, but I just don’t. There’s too much else going on, so this will be short – and…
In the Garden: Between Seasons
I loved this quote from Ben Hewitt that he posted recently: “Things will get done, and that which doesn’t get done will get done later or ultimately be deemed unnecessary in the first place, and we’ll think to ourselves isn’t it lucky we didn’t do it back when we thought it had to…
Hidden
The past few weeks have been an absolute crush of work – the garden must be finished, and the KonMari-inspired, once-in-a-lifetime spring clean is nowhere near complete. And we are still homeschooling for several more weeks. Every day there is just so much to do. The weather has been beautiful, which has made…
The Start of The Season
All of us are sick today, a frustrating situation when there is so much to be done. The beginning of this week was wasted in stumbling around with exhaustion from the cursed Daylight Savings Time. Wednesday morning I was glancing at the clock, and then out the window, and realized I was going to boycott…
Garden Change
Not much was going on in my garden the past couple of months….I stopped planting in January, and it has been the easy, fun harvest-to-table time that makes gardening such a pleasure. You forget about the hard work it took to build and tend it, and only think of how many more rows of such-and-such…
Eating From The Earth
My garden is finally starting to look like something. I was so behind this year, and the cold weather was a long time coming. A lot of the brassicas really didn’t like the heat. They are finally looking happy. It’s a small garden this year, compared to other years, but we are getting so much…
Soaking and Fermenting Cassava
I started growing cassava three years ago. My friends and fellow gardeners Paul and Ginny Campbell gave me the first stalk. Cassava is propagated that way – by saving the stalks to plant the next season. The trick is to store them until the spring without them drying out or molding. Some people wax the…
Planting Potatoes And Sharing Beans
This morning my great uncle called. Years ago he had passed along a bag of long beans that he had grown. He originally got the seeds from my great-grandfather, and has been growing them ever since. He was calling because his basement was repainted last fall, and in the muddle of re-painting, his collection of…
In the garden: Purple Carrots
My purple carrots were small and stunted this year – I don’t think they liked all the heat. They still tasted good. The garden has had a hard time of it lately. One evening when we drove up the cows had busted in somehow. I thought everything would be eaten to nubs, but they had…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 