Back to Eden Garden 2016

We spent our Mother's Day finishing the garden. This has been a project that has lasted for several months, since I first started the seeds in our little indoor greenhouse.

  

We also had our work cut out for us with the garden itself. Last year we let the land rest and while we did not plant anything ourselves, it was amazing how much grass, dandelion, and other weeds took root. We did, however, start installing a chain link fence around the property line on the three main sides. Here are some pictures featuring the original fence we installed when we first bought the house. We were not sure where the property lines were at the time and our entire goal was to keep out the rabbits. We knew that we would be letting the land rest in a few years and that we could replace the temporary fence with something more permanent.

 

Installing the fence ran into a few challenges, namely our haphazard compost pile and scrap wood pile. At one time someone added a lean-to onto the shed. We decided that we wanted to make a dog kennel for our beautiful chocolate lab, Hershey. The compost pile grew year over year as we threw the corn stalks and other garden debris into the corner of the garden. We also ran into an electric power pole. After we had the land surveyed, we discovered that the power pole was placed dead center between our property and the neighbors. They had purchased the home with a few sections of wooden fencing installed about a foot off the property line. After speaking with them, they permitted us to install our fence just outside of our property line and onto theirs, as well as to tie into their fence. Eventually we will be fencing in our entire yard. In the meantime, we needed to get the garden fenced for the next growing season. 

 

We opted to use a chain link fence for the garden because we needed to ensure that we had plenty of light for our growing plants. The guidelines for fences in our community state that a perimeter fence in the rear yard cannot exceed six feet. This became a bit challenging when we installed the fence around the old sugar maple stump. Talk about uneven ground and roots galore! As you can see, we were able to get the main piping in the ground and the supporting poles installed.

 

 

The final step for the main part of the fence was installing the chain link fabric. It was my job to pull with a funny tool my husband bought, while he secured it to the main poles and the upper supporting pole. While not as perfectly straight as I would have preferred, we had to work within the guidelines and the really uneven ground around the tree stump. We only managed to get the three main sides installed before we had to stop for the winter.

As soon as our Wisconsin weather started to warm up, we began to tackle the garden and the fencing again.  We started out by tackling the wood scrap pile. Many of these sticks are leftovers from the 30 cedar trees we removed four years ago. While I worked on removing the grass and weeds from the garden, my husband spent two days burning the smaller sticks, twigs, and kindling. I hauled the grass and weeds to the local compost area while he sorted out the garbage, burnable logs, and mulch. We had to stop burning a few times in order to let the fire pit cool. We moved all the ash into the garden, where I worked it into the soil. Once the wood was taken care of, we needed to deal with the compost pile.

Each year after harvesting the garden produce, we pulled the remaining plants and corn stalks and threw them into a heaping pile that grew, literally, every year. We always had the intention of cleaning it out and someday putting in a real compost bin - we just never got around to it. We were really dreading bagging all of that rotten mess up and hauling it to the city's compost pile. So, you can only imagine our surprise and delight to discover that only the topmost layer was still plant material. Over the past four years, everything else underneath had broken down into the most beautiful and rich composted soil. There was enough there to spread over half of the garden, smothering the remaining bits of grass and weeds that I had not been able to remove.

Once it was all cleaned out, we installed another section of fencing from the main section to the shed. As you can see, we also removed the rotten lean-to. Later this year we plan on installing another section of fencing with a gate at the front of the shed, further enclosing the area and creating a nice, shady dog kennel.

 

 

We replaced the temporary fencing between the shed and the garage with a shorter, permanent fence. We reused the gate that we had originally installed; we just reinstalled the posts in a more permanent manner. Our land is not even close to being level and so we decided to install the fence so that it was straight at the top and will gradually fill in the bottom with soil and more wood chips as the plants grow.

 

 

We had one final section to close off, between the main fence on the property line and the garage. We didn't want anything too tall, since we like to visit a bit with our neighbors while they are working on their garden. Plus, we will be tying into the main fence with the wooden privacy fence and will want to remove this section. We just needed it to close off the garden to any little critters that might find our tender plants appealing.

Once the fence was completed, it was just a matter of getting some new wood chips. We had not laid down a layer of wood chips since our initial loads were delivered in 2011 and 2012. It was time to get a really thick layer down, which we did with four small truckloads from a local landscaping company. Finally, it was time to get planting! By cleaning out the compost area, we expanded the usable space in our garden by about 20' x 60'. I decided to rearrange some plants, and add a whole bunch of new ones! In the single row of tires below we planted salad greens, such as spinach, salad burnett, crisp mint lettuce, buttercrunch lettuce, etc.

 

 

The stack of tires in this picture are two tires tall and house our seed potatoes. We planted three of the tires with red potatoes and two of them with Yukon Gold. Between the two sets of tires we planted zucchini, peppers, cauliflower, broccoli, beets, radishes, cabbages, and other similar types of plants. 

 

Between the potato tires and the fence running almost the full 60' of the garden we planted four rows of corn. We companion plant our corn, so the corn rows to the left of the huge tree stump were planted with kidney beans and butternut squash. We have done this in the past and it worked well. Along the fence lines themselves we planted bean and parsnips together on a 30' section, peas and carrots along five fence sections, and climbing pickling cucumbers on two fence panels.

 

A couple of years ago, we were surprised with a small patch of rhubarb growing behind our shed. We never planted rhubarb and we stored the empty tires and tomato cages there over the winter. We thought we most likely killed the rhubarb since we didn't see any of it last year, with all the junk on it. To our amazement, it came back strong and healthy again this year. Rather than continue to fight it, we fenced it in with some short plastic fencing and planted around it. Behind the rhubarb in the other fenced in area we planted 20 strawberry plants/roots. This is my third attempt at planting strawberries! Hopefully, the nutrient rich soil and the full sun that this area receives will help them to grow and flourish. That whole back area from the rhubarb to the fence used to be the heaping compost pile.

When we first started our garden I planted a row of asparagus seeds along the side of the shed. It was really hard to not cut and pick any of it while we waited for it to grow and take root. This was going to be our first year of harvesting the asparagus and lo and behold, we only had three stalks! Something must have happened since prior years shows a full row of little baby stalks. We were so disappointed but decided to invest in some asparagus root and plant again, rather than using seeds. We are back to the waiting game, but the wait should be much shorter this time around. 

While it was a lot more work this year to get the garden ready and planted, we did it and are looking forward to another great year of gardening. We love the Back to Eden approach since we will not have to continue watering the garden once the seeds begin sprouting and our weeding should also be minimal. And finally, here is a picture of one of our happily transplanted tomato plants.

 

Be sure to stay tuned and we will share more photos of our garden as it grows over the season.

An Interesting Spring

It has been an interesting spring this year, that is for sure. Over the winter, we worked on relatively few projects around the house. The winter seemed longer than usual this year - almost never ending. We began work in the downstairs bathroom by raising the ceiling back to its original height, and creating a buildout to hide the plumbing pipes for upstairs. We also replaced the sink and cabinet with a beautiful porcelain pedestal sink that we picked up for $15 at our citywide rummage sale - in 2013. And we finally decided on a few more of the finishing touches - like the walls and floor.

We also worked a little bit in the living room and dining room area. We are continuing to slowly remove the old varnish from the original wood floors and we finally removed the supporting pillars. The pillars were made of treated outdoor lumber - not something we really wanted in the house due to the chemical processes used. Now, my wonderful husband likes to measure the distance between the floor and the support in the ceiling to make sure nothing has moved.

And, of course, we put in our garden. This is our third year doing the Back to Eden garden method. This year, we were also able to start some of our seeds in the house - and managed to not kill them before getting them into the garden! That was a first for us. Since last year's garden resulted in some unintended produce - like green and gold gourds - this year we did something a little different with our layout. And, we added some new-to-us produce: potatoes, acorn squash, turnips, rutabagas, and cantaloupe. Plus a whole variety of beans that we had never heard about before.

We have plenty of wood chips from the deliveries that we received last year and actually have some extra stored around the garden. This year, I have been spending more time working around the plants and, unfortunately, weeding. This was due to a decision, regrettably, that we made last year. We wanted to try and save our own seeds and thought we would try with dill. And so we let it go to seed. Big mistake. I should have sealed the seeding plants in bags or something because they spread their seeds throughout the entire garden. And so, I have little dill, and for some reason parsley, sprouting everywhere. Fortunately, the "weeds" are coming out of the ground fairly nicely and once pulled, I have been putting down additional wood chips in an effort to prevent any reappearances.

Little Peter Rabbit had also discovered our garden this year. Unbeknownst to us, a momma rabbit had her babies in our garden and was keeping them in some tires we had set aside for our potatoes. We noticed momma rabbit getting into the garden and so we added additional fencing around the gate and did some other minor repairs, which successfully locked momma out - and away from her babies. Once we realized that we had baby bunnies in the tires, a couple of days later, we felt really bad. Of the four, one had already died. We moved the surviving three to a corner of the yard where there was plenty of old wood and some shade and security. Unfortunately, it was too little too late and over the course of a few days, we had to dispose the rest of the bunnies. It was so sad.

And yet, we continued on and our garden was thriving. The beans were doing especially well and then, one day, an entire four foot section was gone! The culprit - Peter Rabbit. We finally caught him in the garden and my husband began to chase him. To our surprise, he jumped through the fence - literally. What?! Upon closer inspection, we noticed that the fence we put up the first year, made of plastic, had been chewed through in several placed, providing an open air restaurant for Peter Rabbit! Not good. We reinforced the fence with chicken wire. And since then, have not seen Peter Rabbit in the garden.

We thought that we might not have any radishes this year. For some reason, our plants seemed to grow almost too fast, in same cases already getting ready to go to seed. We thought it might be because of too much water combined with a succession of hot, sunny days. I finally decided that I would just have to thin out the radishes, pulling those that were going to seed as well as those that were starting to overtake the row of tomatoes in the next row. To my surprise, I ended up pulling several very nice sized radishes! Enough to fill a quart jar for my wonderful husband to enjoy!

All in all, a very interesting spring!

Yes, We Are Alive And Well

I cannot believe how fast time gets away from me! We have had a really busy spring and summer is bursting out on us already. So, here are some updates.

The Living Room Floor
I am sure that some of you are wondering how the living room floor is holding up from our non-traditional refinishing approach. Surprisingly, it still looks really good. I have cleaned it one time with a solution I mixed consisting of vinegar, olive oil, and water. It refreshed it beautifully. At some point, we do plan on sealing it with something more conventional, but for now, we are continuing as is and hoping to get to the dining room next.

Back to Eden Garden - Year Two
A lot of you like to know how the Back to Eden garden approach works. Well, we are floored by the goodness of God! We actually planted our garden super early (for Wisconsin) this year. We had everything in the ground by the third week of April. Yes, we know it was still cold. But, believe it or not, our garden soil was not frozen! The heavy mulch that we put down last fall really helped. We had more weeds this year initially but I think this was due to two factors: (1) we had a much wetter spring than last year and (2) I was not able to get a truckload of wood chips until the last week of June. We had tried to get some using the same resources from last year, but it was not working out. But then one day, I noticed a company cutting down some of our neighbors' trees. So I asked for the wood chips. At first, they said "no" because they thought I would not want the leaves and everything. I finally convinced them that I knew what I would be getting and so we got a whole truckload! They were really happy to give it to us since it saved them a trip back to their home shop - about an hour away one way!

It is because of the garden that I have not been able to blog like I wanted to. We have already eaten all the radishes and lettuces. We are almost to the end of the sweet peas and are getting buried in zucchini and green beans. Plus with the local strawberries coming in and now the blueberries, I have been super busy canning, processing and baking.

We did do a few things different this year. Over the winter I read a few books on companion gardening and so we tried this approach. Since this is only our second year of gardening, we feel this year has already been a success, and we definitely learned from our mistakes last year. But the learning curve continues.

We learned last year to cage our tomatoes. This year, we learned that tomatoes will grow where you never even planted them - like in the middle of your corn.

This year I planted beets, and learned that beets look a lot like dandelions and other weeds when they first sprout. Yep, you guessed it - I pulled all my beets! And replanted them.

I learned that peas love carrots and parsnips. All three are growing like crazy! I also learned that corn, beans, and vine plants love one another. Unfortunately, picking beans that are growing around corn stalks, covered with vine plants like squash means it is really hard to get the beans! Those vine plants are itchy! But I have had a much better crop of beans this year compared to last year!

Last year and this year I planned out the garden using Excel. Last year it worked great. This year, not so much. The plan was awesome, but because we did not plant in traditional rows for a large portion of the garden due to the interspersing of herbs and flowers, I have no idea of what is growing and where. It was really confusing. I can't tell you how many times my husband asked me what something was and I had to admit I had no clue because I had never planted much less seen half of the stuff before!

Last year we learned that onions take a really long time to get big like the ones in the store. This year I planted from seed so that NEXT year, I will have wonderful onions. Please God? I only planted like six or seven varieties.....and I really want some good onions!

The House
We have not done a whole lot to the house. My wonderful husband made some new window screens so we could open the windows in our bedroom and the ones at the end of the hall. This helped tremendously in cooling down the house in the early days of summer.

Once it got really hot, we rigged up our own central air. We sealed up all the vents in the basement so that a minimal amount of air leaked out of them. We then installed a window air conditioner in the room with the cold air return for the furnace. Turn on the furnace fan and it sucks the cold air from the air return (cold from the air conditioner and it settling to the floor) and redistributes the air conditioned air throughout the house.  Once the vents were blowing cold air, we strategically placed fans in front of each vent upstairs to disperse the air into each room. Voila! Central air. It actually made the second floor of our house livable. Or should I say sleepable?

My husband also surprised me with two apple trees, a blueberry bush and a raspberry bush. We agreed that I could have a small orchard in the front and side of our house, to the clothesline. From the clothesline to the shed and vegetable garden, I am not allowed to plant anything. I think my husband is afraid he won't have anyplace to throw a ball with the kids.

I tried something new this year. Every year that we have been here, I have tried to plant strawberries from seeds. Seeds sold in packets. And nothing has ever grown. So, I took a whole bunch of strawberries that I picked myself from the pick-your-own farm and planted them. Yes, I did. I planted a row of fresh, ripe strawberries. I figured that if they would grow and spread plants at the farm then why not at my house. I am not the only person that thinks this makes perfectly logical sense? Right? So, hopefully next year I will have a beautiful batch of strawberries. Or at a minimum, plants. I mulched them really good with wood chips, and I have been watering them almost daily. I figured with about 100 seeds per strawberry, the odds have to be in my favor.

And we fixed the toilet. Apparently, one of the three stooges, oops, I mean one of the three younger children decided to flush Hamm, the hot wheels version of Hamm, the pig from Toy Story, down the toilet. And Hamm, being made of metal and being slightly taller than the average Hot Wheels, went only so far and then got stuck. We could flush, but had to pray and plunge and eventually the water would disappear down the drain. We tried using a special tool to push Hamm through the toilet to the main pipe, but alas, it did not work. My poor husband had to remove the toilet and push Hamm back out the way it originally went in. I have to admit that Hamm really did look like a pig that had rolled in the "mud". It was down right nasty. But I did learn that installing a toilet is much easier than I first imagined.

That's all for now....I hear some zucchini calling my name.

Waiting....

Up here in the frozen tundra, winter seems unwilling to release her hold on us as we anxiously await warm spring days. It is hard to believe that last year, at this time, we were enjoying warm, balmy days and were hard at work taking down all the trees in the yard. This year, as you can see, no such luck!

This snow is actually fresh...fresh, as in it fell last night and was added to on and off throughout the day today. Which means that we are still working sporadically on interior projects, like scraping the trim in the upstairs hallway. Boy, that's about as exciting as it can get. I am sure you are sorry to have missed post after post about how we have been scraping. And scraping. And scraping. Hours and hours of it. We have killed about four scrapers thus far, with more left to do.

A few years before we bought the house, someone had the brilliant idea of painting all the original trim white. Except that they must not have known about such things as sandpaper or primer because the paint was not sticking too well and could actually be picked at and removed with fingernails. Not that I recommend that method be used!

 

So this is what we started with. Underneath all of that white paint is beautiful trim, most of which was originally installed in the house when it was built. And here is where we are at today.

This hallway has two windows and four doors. Originally, though, the hallway had five doors and one window, but the window pictured above replaced the original door. We are planning on reinstalling the door. Why, you might ask? Because we hope to someday add a two-story greenhouse onto the back of the house. We have been told that at one time, there was a double glassed-in porch on the house, but that it was torn down when it became unsafe due to neglect. 

So, as you can see, not a whole lot is happening that is really exciting to write and read about. Hopefully, this cold spell will go away soon and then we will have more updates. We are planning on painting the house this year! And of course, we are putting in the vegetable garden. We are also planning on adding four more gardens around the house and yard. So, stay tuned for painting and landscaping....eventually!

Canning Season Is Over

Canning season has come to an end for 2012 with the processing of the pumpkins. While in the midst of it all, it seemed like I was canning every day. Now that we are done, I was surprised at how little I was able to get done out of our garden. I am thankful for the Back to Eden approach and am looking forward to doing it again next year, but I was really surprised by the total overall. I had such high expectations for our first gardening experience! I am trying to keep in mind that this year we were suffering from a horrible drought and some of our plants just didn't seem to produce, such as the Brussels sprouts.

I have updated the food preservation page to include the totals of everything preserved for 2012. Now that the season is over, I was able to put it into alphabetical order and sort it by size, so it is a little easier to read. It will be interesting to see how 2013 will do compared to 2012 now that we have a better grasp of the garden and canning. I also have to remind myself that this was only my second year of canning, too!

In all, we put away 8.5 gallons (freezer bags) in the big freezer and 93 half-pints, 84 pints, and 187 quarts in the pantry. We are still in the process of organizing our pantry, adding additional shelving and just getting it organized overall. Once we finish getting it cleaned up and organized for winter, I will post some pictures to share with everyone.

We are already in the process of looking ahead to 2013 and are considering a few new things. We are researching greenhouses and are actually thinking of replacing our shed with an assemble-yourself greenhouse. This should help with seed starting come February. I also watched a phenomenal video on youtube that taught how to start seeds to ensure proper growth. I am really excited to try out some of their ideas. We are looking at expanding the garden into the flower gardens around the house by planting the culinary herbs, herbal tea plants and medicinal plants close to the house. This year, we are ordering our heirloom seeds from a provider that we recently heard about, www.mypatriotsupply.com. With the new herbs and medicinal plants, I had to order a book so that I could learn how to use them! Finally, I also ordered a book on owning a root cellar. We used to have a root cellar in our basement that someone cemented over. Hopefully this book will give us some ideas on how to either restore or build a new root cellar for more storage options.

Now that summer is over, we are back to working on various projects around the house. Thus far, we have reorganized the laundry room. All year long, the washer and dryer have been driving me crazy by "walking" around! I was also having trouble adjusting to having the washer on the right and the dryer on the left as I lived with it in a reverse formation for the past eight years. We initially tried balancing the appliances using cardboard, but they walked right off that too! It was getting really frustrating and annoying, especially since we have a metal capped sewer pipe of some sorts right in that area - and the washer seemed to be constantly hitting it, making even more noise. We finally solved all the problems by switching the two appliances and getting everything adjusted. I am so happy! (Isn't it amazing how the simplest things can put a smile on our face?). Our last improvement to the laundry areas was the addition of a shelving unit like we are using in the pantry. This gives me a great place to store laundry supplies and other project odds and ends.

We also hung the original pantry door back up. The door was found lying on the floor against the outer pantry wall. Unfortunately, it was buried behind so much clutter that we could barely get to it. As part of our basement clean up project, we got that area all cleaned up and decided to hang the door. We weren't really sure why it was taken off to begin with, but suspected it had something to do with the hinges, since they were missing. To our disgust, we discovered that the door had been removed because the piping to the furnace was hung too low, causing the door to only be opened a few inches. Thankfully, this was an easy fix - we simply had to move a supporting block of wood and hang a few inches higher the pipe supports. Now the door can swing open freely. The door needs some work and we are missing some of the hardware, but it still is a neat thing to see, especially since most of the original doors were removed prior to us owning the house.

I'm sure that we will be working on a lot more projects in the house over the winter months - such as working on the wood floors! Unfortunately, we need to use our heat guns to do that project and, really, who wants to use a heat gun in the middle of summer!

Next time, I'll try to have more pictures. Til then, God bless!

Green Tomatoes

Living in Wisconsin with our wonderfully unpredictable weather patterns has made gardening interesting this year. First, we had a very late spring, with killing frosts followed by an unseasonably hot summer resulting in a severe drought. We are so thankful that we used the Back to Eden garden method this year! And now, we are anticipating near freezing temperatures at night. Due to our concerns about the temperatures, we decided this past Saturday to pull all of our tomato plants and harvest all the green tomatoes. The final result? More than 26 gallons worth. These have all been bagged in brown paper grocery store bags to ripen over the course of the next week or two.

We are also anticipating a rather large crop of watermelons and so we have been experimenting with some new recipes (new to us) for watermelon syrup and hopefully, watermelon jam. My first batch did not work as anticipated, hence, the seven pints of watermelon syrup. It tasted really good - it just didn't jell the way we hoped it would.

We also have several peppers and some new flowers on our pepper plants. I am anticipating picking the last of the peppers as my bags of tomatoes turn red. All of our peppers have been incorporated into our spaghetti sauce and soup this year. Out of everything that we planted, we hit the balance just right with our green peppers!

Our wonderful neighbor next door has shared some of her Concord grapes with us, too. So, I will be making a small batch of grape jam here shortly.

Finally, we have been inundated with fruit flies ever since we processed our pears. Nothing we did seemed to get rid of them! Until now....

We took a budding meats container and punched holes into the top using a Pampered Chef vegetable holder. We then put some fresh fruit inside (in this picture, there are grapes and watermelon). And then we just let it sit. Man, do those annoying fruit flies love it! Even better, once they are in there, they are not able to get out. After a few days, we stick the container in the freezer to kill off the flies and dispose of them and reset the container. It has worked awesome! Prior to this, we tried different things involving apple cider vinegar, and a variety of containers, covers, etc. None of them worked except for this! Just thought we would share!

Getting Buried In Produce - A Back to Eden Garden Update

Our Back to Eden garden is definitely keeping me busy, especially now that the tomatoes are coming in, literally, by the brown bag full. I know that seeing is believing and so I thought I would show a small timeline of photographs for you.

This first picture was taken on August 27th, about a week before Labor Day weekend. My husband's parents had come to visit us, so we had intentionally skipped a day of picking so that we could share the joy of harvesting with them. And what a harvest it was - the largest that we had picked to date. We picked cabbage, carrots, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, green beans, and two bowls of tomatoes.

 

 We continued to harvest throughout the following week, mostly cucumbers and tomatoes. By labor day, we needed to pick even more - butternut squash and sweet corn - in addition to the usual cucumbers and tomatoes. Two days later, the abundant harvest continued.

 

This past Wednesday, in addition to tomatoes and cucumbers, we picked carrots, green beans, and our first red and ripe watermelon. Oh, what a sweet and juicy treat the watermelon was! And, the harvest still continues. Each day, we pick at least one brown bag full of tomatoes, which I am now processing in two stock pots at least twice a week in an effort to keep up! For those on the fence regarding this type of gardening, I highly recommend it! As you can see, we have been truly blessed by God's provisions.

Back to Eden Garden Update

I thought that I would take a few minutes this wet and rainy Thursday to update everyone on how are garden is doing. We are very pleased with our results of using the Back to Eden gardening approach. Other than the initial watering that we did when we initially planted our seeds and plants, we have not had to water our garden - and we are in one of the worst droughts in the history of our area! We are so thankful to God for His provisions!

On the Food Preservation page (see menu on left), I am keeping track of everything that we are preserving. But this page does not really tell the whole story. We have definitely learned a few things along the way, as this has been our first garden. When selecting our seeds and laying out the garden, it was challenging for me to be able to visualize how much produce we would have from a particular plant. Case in point, all the tomato plants! Along the way, though, we have been truly amazed by so many aspects of our garden.

To date, we have finished the European Mesclun Salad. For some reason, our Iceberg Lettuce and Giant Noble Spinach did not really produce this year. Fortunately, we had some seeds given to us for a green leaf lettuce and that did okay. I am not sure what we are going to plant for salad greens next year.

The Catskill Brussel Sprouts seem to be growing good. At least, the plants are getting really big. We just don't seem to have any sprouts yet, but then again, I am not even really sure what to look for!

Next to the sprouts, we had planted our Emerald Giant Green Peppers - none of which survived my initial indoor seed start. Hopefully, we will have better results next year. Thankfully, I had purchased some Big Bertha Green Peppers from the local Amish greenhouse and these have been producing in abundance. While the peppers have been on the smaller side and long and skinny (as opposed to the big round ones at the grocery store), they have been plentiful. We pick an average of 2 to 3 peppers every couple of days. Thus far, I have almost one gallon frozen and have used closed to a dozen of them in homemade spaghetti sauces, salsa and tomato soups.

As mentioned in a previous post, we finished up our broccoli some time ago, but I think we may have stopped a little prematurely. Once I decided to let it all go to seed, we started to see a whole bunch of broccoli heads all over the plants! I probably could have frozen a few gallons worth had I not let it go to seed. Something new learned for next year! We have one plant that we are watching carefully becasue we do not know what it is! It looks kind of like the broccoli, but a little different. We are hoping that it is the Giant of Naples Cauliflower that we planted. Only time will tell.

None of the onions that I planted really grew. I am not sure what we did wrong, but fortunately the local hardware store had given us a bag with 100 onion sets. I planted them with little expectation. I am pleased to announce that these onions are growing very well. The bulbs are still on the smaller side, but the potency is strong! I have been slowly pulling a few out of the garden when I have a lot of tomatoes to process. These green onions - tops and all - are being used with the green peppers to season our spaghetti sauces, salsa and tomato soup. Mmmm good!

Our zucchini plant has been a slow, but steady producer. We have already been blessed with two zucchinis and can see two more slowly growing. The plant itself seems to be getting taller and much wider - taking over some of the tomato and cabbage plants on one side and the broccoli on the other. It is so wide, that we can barely walk around it without risking damaging other produce.

The carrots are also slowly getting bigger and fatter. At least once a week we pull one or two "just to check". We planted quite a few, but they are much slower growing than I had anticipated. The Stonehedge Cabbage is also growing very well. We harvested our first one and attempted to cook it and then serve it with a basic white sauce. The smell of the cabbage was enough to forgo more than just a little bite, but my husband seemed to enjoy it - he ate almost the entire head himself!

And now for the the funny things that are garden has taught us thus far....squash like to spread and are able to bypass the garden fence! We have three or four squash growing outside of the garden in addition to the nearly 30 feet of vines growing inside the garden!

We have also learned that our corn plants get tall - really tall. I remember corn plants from my childhood and they had seemed tall to my little girl height, but I don't remember them being taller than a simple garden shed!

We also learned that a few seeds can go a long way - especially when it comes to watermelons. We planted 25 seeds and we now have over 20 watermelons growing behind our shed, with new ones appearing almost weekly!

We had one watermelon that we thought might be ready and so, anxious to try one, we went ahead and picked it. It sounded hollow, the skin was dull and it looked so good...until we opened it!

Needless to say, we were all very dissapointed. But all is not lost - I found a recipe online for pickled watermelon rind and we were able to can one quart of the rinds. The most challenging part of the whole thing was getting rid of the seeds - there were so many I seemed to get a scoop full every time I attempted to make a melon ball!

Finally, we have learned why it is so important to cage your tomato plants. If this step is not done, you will end up with a tomato jungle!

We have hundreds of green tomatoes with a few red ones every couple of days. Unfortunately, it can be a real challenge to get the ripe tomatoes out! The branches of the tomato plants are so intertwined that we risk breaking off the branches while moving them in an attempt to get to the tomatoes underneath. So far, we have only lost one complete branch - with about 20 green tomatoes on it! I diced them up along with the red ones and made some salsa. It has also been a race with the chipmunks to get the ripe tomatoes out of the garden before they take a bite

We are also getting a fairly good amount of cucumbers. I have been pickling one to two quarts almost daily - some dill and some bread and butter. My family is counting down until they can open the first jar!

Well, that's about it for now. Got to get back to the canner!

Cucumbers & Basil

I recently attended a Ladies of Virtue meeting for our church. I was asked to bring tea sandwiches. I had never made these types of sandwiches before, but I was super excited because I had just gotten a KitchenAid Stand Mixer and was itching to test it. First, I made some french bread using Pillsbury dough and my Pampered Chef bread tin. While that was baking, I made 2 loaves of homemade white bread using the new mixer. The next day, I whipped up to salad spreads. The first was tuna and the second, a cream cheese base for cucumbers. I topped the tuna tea sandwiches with fresh basil, picked right from our garden. The little cucumbers for the cucumber tea sandwiches also came from my garden.

I thought that these came out looking beautiful! And they didn't taste too bad either (surprising since I am not a big fan of either tuna or cucumbers!).

The cucumbers are starting to really pick up in quantity and most days, I am able to can at least one quart. Right now, I am making only dill pickles, and once my dill seasoning runs out, I will switch to bread and butter. I am really pleased with the results of these Parisian Pickling Cucmbers!

Happy Canning to everyone!

Crazy Summer

This summer has been a bit of a crazy one for us thus far...we have been mostly keeping busy with the garden and the day-to-day chores of laundry, ironing, cooking, and cleaning. We have also been busy preparing to install the fence, which meant a lot of cleaning up along the border of the property line. We also fixed all the windows on the first floor so that we could finally install the screens, allowing some much needed air flow during this hot season!

The garden continues to flourish, despite the heat. The Back to Eden method that we have been using has definitely delivered as promised as we have not had to water our garden all season. Here is a picture collage....

So far, we are done with the broccoli, radishes and first planting of salad greens. Our watermelons are growing beautifully, and we just picked our first zucchini and small batch of pickling cucumbers. We are keeping a close eye on the corn, but it appears to be growing well. Our tomatoes have so many green ones that they are literally falling all over themselves. We are going to have to do something about that, and soon. All in all, we feel truly blessed.

Blueberries arrived at the local Amish store, and so we were in full swing canning, freezing and dehydrating for a few days. I should be updating the food preservation page shortly with what we have preserved as well as what we have eaten fresh! Out of 30 pounds of blueberries, we made 4 fresh pies, 2 gallons frozen, 17 half-pints and 2 pints of jam, plus a dehydrater full. My little helpers were eating them almost as fast as I could process them, so I ended up leaving about 5 pounds fresh to be eaten.

Hope everyone is enjoying their summer, even with the heat!

Back to Eden Garden - Radishes

One of the plants that we decided to put in our garden this year was the Giant Sicily Radish, ordered from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (www.rareseeds.com). Their description advises that this particular type of radish will produce a 2" round, bright red radish. Here is the picture from their site.

The Back to Eden video does advise that following this gardening approach can result in larger than average production. It also mentions that he does not "thin" out his garden. We have been thinning ours, but only on an as-eating approach. Keep in mind, that we did not plant our garden until the first weekend in June...and that these were planted from seed and not starter plants.

Our plants are not as circular as those in the advertisement, but that is probably due to overcrowding. Next year, I will be much more aware of my spacing when putting in those tiny little seeds! And our radishes appear to be more "hot pink" than red. Either way, I think our results are phenomenal! For comparison purposes, we used a nickel to show the size (we couln't find a quarter, which probably would have been better). Personally, I am not a huge fan of radishes, but my husband loves these. He has even found some recipes for eating the green tops.

I am sure that as we continue to thin out the rows, and provide more room, we will get results a bit rounder than root shaped. Regardless, I am quite pleased with these and plan on growing them again next year...just a little bit more spaced apart.