Harvest Outcomes

The garden kept me really busy throughout spring, summer and fall but the harvest was worth the time spent tending all those plants. Every week we could fill two of these white containers to the rim with fresh vegetables. There is nothing more satisfying than growing your own food, knowing where it came from and that it was produced organically with lots of TLC makes a big difference. It gives you respect for what nature can do and forces you to want to be frugal with everything you grow. Using all parts, or at least, recycling back into compost for next years harvest is a sustainable practice and brings the gardening experience full circle. Although our harvest was great, I think it could have been better. We had a few problems with disease and pests on the cucumbers, squash and tomatoes. We had slugs eat most of the strawberries. The March tornado took out some of the corn plants. A late spring frost killed most of my tomato transplants so I had to start over from seed in early summer. In the next few blogs, I will explain what happened and how we tried to remedy the problems or what we plan to do different this coming season. We had great luck with the peppers, watermelons, berries, herbs and pole beans. The end of the summer is of course, the busiest time. We canned several jars of tomatoes, spaghetti sauce, peppers, corn and beans.We also froze squash, peppers and green beans. We found out that chickens love watermelons and pumpkins so we feed them our surplus. More lessons learned on the chickens and ducks to follow. It's late January and we have had temperatures in the single digits with freezing rain and ice. The dark days are getting to me and I have turned to my Mother Earth News magazines and gardening books for comfort. I am happy to say that I now have a beautiful greenhouse where I am currently growing several cold crops for early spring and I love to go out there and do a little winter gardening. I will go over the greenhouse construction and future plans for it in another posts as well. So much has happened since my last blog entry that there is no way to update it all in one post. Over the next few weeks, I will play catch-up on my blog and do some planning for this years garden. I will also be discussing some issues near and dear to my heart including persistent herbicides infecting compost that are killing organic farms and gardens, GMO's, factory farming, vaccines, auto-immune disorders and endocrine disruptor's, chem trails and gun control. Stay tuned!