Our Gardening Update

It has been so long since I have written on this site that I thought I would catch you up on what we are doing now in the garden.

This year we have grown most of the vegetables that I feature in my book The Survival Garden.

We planted much more of our garden in raised beds and doing has its advantages over growing in garden rows.

Using Raised Beds and Mulching Them

The advantages of planting in raised beds include the fact that we can plant intensively in the bed. We can also focus our resources. These resources include water, fertilizer, insect damage control tools, and disease prevention, and we can mow between the beds. In addition, because the beds aren’t walked on, the raised beds keep the soil aerated for the benefit of plant roots and soil microbes.

We mulch all our beds with our grass clippings. These grass clippings not only conserve water and protect the soil from getting too hot or too cold, but the grass clippings feed the soil by adding nitrogen and becoming food for the microbes too.

The Harvest Has Begun!

We’ve been eating greens from our “salad bar” for several weeks now. I pick and wash the greens and then use them in sandwiches and salads.

We just harvested our garlic and are now planting our sweet potatoes in the same area where we had the garlic. One day we pulled the garlic and cleared out the weeds and the next day we conditioned the soil and that evening we planted our sweet potato slips.

Our beans are growing fast. These are our beans last week.

Our bush beans are now blossoming, and our pole beans are diligently climbing the fences that we provided for them. By the end of this week, we will be picking the first bush beans. We should have enough to eat fresh and have some to either sell at farmers’ market or can. I will probably be doing a load of green bean canning next week.

Soon we will also harvest our potatoes too. These we’ll use to eat fresh, can in green beans and new potatoes, dry in the dehydrator, and prepare and freeze some for French fries and hash browns.

Our tomatoes, peppers, and onions are growing like crazy. We have blossoms and fruit on the tomatoes and peppers and the onions are developing bigger bulbs than we’ve had in this garden.

Our carrots are growing as are the beets. We hope these will be ready within the next few weeks as well.

I hope you take the time to read the book The Survival Garden and apply at least some of the methods so that you don’t have to can, freeze, or dehydrate all of your foods.