Well, I know I love looking at pictures of gardens, so I thought I’d share ours. It is coming along well, but we haven’t eaten anything (except the herbs) yet. Hopefully this year marks the start of a regular harvest from a spring and fall garden in East Texas. We also hope to keep expanding it enough each year to eventually have some extra for you! In the meantime, check out what we have growing this spring.
What do you have growing right now?
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- Here is a tall shot of the bed where the brassicas are. Closer are broccoli and farther are cabbage. Most of the cabbage will end up as homemade sauerkraut!
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- The baby broccoli heads forming. My head is spinning with ideas for all the things I will make out of this delicious, organically-home-grown broccoli!
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- This is the biggest one so far. Did you know that the heads of broccoli are really clusters of unopened flower buds? If you don’t harvest them soon enough, you’ll have lots of pretty little yellow flowers where your broccoli used to be!
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- Here is a baby cabbage. It hasn’t begun forming a head yet, and will be monstrous by the time it does!
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- Here are the red potato plants with some grass clippings thrown on. Potatoes love moist, compost-like growing conditions, so I add mulch-like things whenever I have them. Soon I will add soil and hill up around these plants in order to double my potato yield!
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- This is the permanent home of the asparagus and strawberries, which I started as roots or “crowns.” While they are getting established, I interplanted some short-season crops like turnips, radishes, beets, and carrots. It’s a regular hodge-podge!
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- I haven’t had much luck with strawberries up to now, but I have high hopes this year, since finally I am doing two things: 1. Giving the strawberries enough space (they need a pretty good amount!), and 2. Leaving them alone! I couldn’t settle on the best place for the berries, so kept moving them around, preventing a second year of growth and the potential for a great harvest. Hopefully we’ll get loads of berries this year and in the years to come.
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- This is probably my most-anticipated crop in the garden. I LOVE sweet green peas, though they are fairly space- and labor-intensive. They are nothing like store-bought peas at all. Hopefully this little plot will make enough that I can eat them fresh in the garden and still have some left for dinner!
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- We eat lots of onions at our house, so hopefully this little plot will get us started on growing all our own. If I can make the garden grow well this year, perhaps Matt will let me expand it more next year to really put a dent in our veggie bill!
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- I’ve got Detroit Red beets growing here. We like to do a lot of fermenting, and the kids absolutely love lacto-fermented beets (so does everyone else in the house!). Next year I will try a cylindrical variety (not a round “globe” variety), but since I had these seeds this year, that’s what I planted.
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- Here is a close-up of a baby beet. It will be another month before harvest, and then a week or two to ferment and eat.
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- I love growing fresh herbs, because they add so much flavor to food. This is the oregano, which is doing extremely well in its little pot!
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- Here are more herbs. Here is cilantro, which, according to my friend, Carole, really should be a fall crop because it seeds so readily when the weather gets warm. But I hope to get enough leaves to make my years’ worth of salsa, then I will let it go to seed and save the seeds for ground coriander, which is a delightful spice in Mexican dishes.
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- Another trial of rosemary cuttings (haven’t had much success in the past, but why not try again?); one lovage plant, which will hopefully be my heat-tolerant perennial alternative to celery, and fenugreek for the chickens and cows. I don’t know why I ever bought fenugreek seed, but I did, and since I don’t do much Indian cooking, I plan to give it to the critters for a tasty snack. The word “fenugreek” means “Greek hay,” and supposedly was used to make cows eat spoiled hay. I guess that means they really like the taste, so I’ll grow a little to make them happy.
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- I can’t take credit for these gorgeous babies. My friend Cathy and I made a deal—I’d buy the seeds and she’d start the plants, and we’d split them. Since she is so good at starting tomatoes (and I am NOT), she agreed. She delivered my plants a couple of days ago, and they look wonderful!
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- I haven’t counted the number of varieties yet, but it’s a bunch. These 30 plants will go in behind the broccoli and cabbage next month. Can’t wait to have that first batch of salsa!
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- Here is another patch of beets—Bull’s Blood variety. Did I mention that we love beets?
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- Here are the first of the true carrot leaves. Now for the hard part—thinning!
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- That same friend, Cathy, also gave me some extra lettuces she had, so into the garden they went. Now that the weather is a little warmer, they are starting to take off!
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- So pretty!
Our family was privileged to attend this year’s American Pastured Poultry Producer’s Association Conference in Dallas. It was three days of wonderful networking and sharpening of farming minds. If you’re a farmer type, we highly recommend attending. If you’re a beginner, it’s an ocean of information to drink in as fast as you can. If you’re a middle-experience farmer, it’s an opportunity to gain the knowledge you need
