Saturday, March 10, 2012

Garden 2012 Spring edition

We mowed today for the first time in 2012! 
Brendon mowed over the winter garden to get it ready for spring tilling and planting.
We enjoyed our fall/winter garden and it is SO much easier to garden that time of year, because weeds are
largely not an issue.  We had collards, turnips, radishes, various lettuces, broccoli, and cabbage.
It's so fun to send a child out the door to pluck some things for dinner!

This is our garden freshly mowed.

 We are trying potatoes for the first time.  Brendon read about the trash can method and we are giving it a try!  Here are three cans already planted with seed potatoes. 

Apparently you plant the potatoes and when they grow through the dirt you add more dirt and cover.  Repeating until it gets to the top of the can and then you just let them grow until they are ready.

 We love to eat berries.  We planted a few blueberries.  Berries tend to be crops which are heavily sprayed (also potatoes) and we try to avoid the heavily sprayed foods as much as possible.  But, have you seen the price of organic berries? Yikes!  We decided to grow our own.  It will be next year before we get any fruit off of them, but we are looking forward to it.  I think we have six blueberries planted.
Baby Blueberry Bush.
 Baby Raspberry Cane

We planted various types of apples and pear and a couple other fruit trees.
We won't get any fruit off of them this year, but we are looking forward to next year.

 This is my favorite farmer!  Planting the raspberry canes.
 We had to cut down a tree in the front yard.  We will turn most of it into mulch. 
Our most awesome neighbor has a friend with a mulcher.  We will pay to use it, but it's still much more economical than any other solutions we have asked about.
All this gardening is actually quite alot of work, but we have learned alot and the rewards are just fantastic!
We love to do it and we get to feed our family nourishing food that we know all about.
Brendon is keeping a detailed journal this year of what he's doing when, cost etc... 

1 comment:

Corner of Commerce said...

Tamara,

I did the same think with tires for growing potatoes with my fifth grade classes. Works like a charm. Your yard is the bomb!!!!