Garden 2012 update #2

We started to harden off the seedlings today.  Can you believe they were just seeds a month ago?

Here are tomatoes, peppers, basil and eggplant sitting out on the sunny front porch.

These are strawberries in one of the raised beds Brendon built last week.

 The fantastic little beds lined up so sweetly.  The first one contains the strawberries.

The second and third raised bed are herbs or they will be! 

The fourth one will be asparagus.

 One of our blooming fruit trees. 

 Brendon watering the strawberries.

 Mavis our border collie.  She is a hilarious trip!!!

She would love to live on a livestock farm, but for now she contents herself chasing birds, bees, runners and cyclists!

 Zippy one of the farm cats.  I agreed to outdoor cats and am proud to say they did their job this week and caught a critter! 

 RJ the other farm cat.  He is a lion and gives grasshoppers a terrible fright!

 Sarah is 13 years old.  This is the smartest and best guard dog.

Love her, but she's sure aging!

This is a great old dogwood! It's on the side of my front yard.  My neighbor thinks it's possibly near to 100 years old.  I don't know, but it's pretty neat.

Garden Spring 2012 update

On Saturday Brendon built 3 garden boxes to make raised beds for herbs and asparagus.

Here he is working hard. 

 Tonight the neighbor was out plowing and tilling his garden!

So Brendon and the kids went to talk to him and he loaned the tractor to Brendon!

 The tiller is awesome!

 Brendon having fun!

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... 

Garden 2011

Isabelle and Joseph planting seeds.

Just before track practice on Friday the kids enthusiasticly planted our vegetable seeds in starter trays.  We like to have an organic garden, so we ordered our seed trays and packets from Gardens Alive all of which arrived a few days ago via the big brown UPS truck. Yours truly made an orderly little chart documenting the columns and rows of each tray and it's contents. We all really love our garden, and my mouth is watering just thinking of fresh cucumbers and tomatoes plucked from the garden in the morning and eaten for lunch!