Today is August 6th and I wanted to share with you our garden harvest so far, along with a few photos.
21 lb. cucumbers
4 lb hot peppers
2 lb. beans
13 lb. tomatoes
1 lb. trombocinos (we wanted to try one young)
65 lb. zucchinis
26lb of beets
Tag: garden
My Strawberries Have Their Own Tent
I haven’t had any issues with birds getting to my strawberries this year. Mostly because they’ve only just started ripening and I put plastic pinwheels in the bales to scare them off. Today, I decided it was better that the strawberries have protection from above. They can self-pollenate, but there are also gaps where a bee could get in and help out if they wanted.
Quick Cold Frame
Stack of junk? 
Hidden garden
Some of my starts had outgrown my indoor green house so I needed to move them outside. I needed to harden them off and I still needed to protect them from the wind, rain, and chickens. Cold frames seemed to be the answer.
I had never built one before but I needed one quick. I laid out four hay bales leftover from winter feed and set the plants inside on the ground. I have a piece of clear polycarbonate that I rescued from someone’s bulk trash day, a hardware cloth panel from a coop we took apart, and a tiny skid. The poly covers the plants overnight and when it’s chilly. The hardware cloth keeps the chickens out when I can take the poly off or it sits on top of if to keep the wind from lifting it. The skid provides dappled shade through the day and adds weight on windy days.
Cost of project: time
The never-ending vegetable
We harvested a little over 7 dozen Waltham Butternut squash last fall. We processed a bunch and froze them. They filled about half of our chest freezer. The rest, we kept in a box in a corner of the kitchen.
We have 2 dozen squash left over as of today, all still in good condition. Not to mention the squash waiting in the freezer. We lost a few to rot… maybe five? Not bad for 3 squash plants in straw bales.
Spring Fever!
Spring planning begins in January for me. I’ve been mapping out what we want to grow, how we want to lay out the garden this year, planning the irrigation lines, ordering seeds, and enjoying a tiny experiment of a single onion in a kratky hydroponics jar (it’s getting tall!) In February, we started 3 kratky jars of sweet potatoes for slips, strawberry seeds, cabbage, and peppers.
March is now here and spring fever has arrived with it. I’ve begun knocking down the old straw bales from the garden to make way for the new bales. We learned a lot from last year and we’re changing up the layout to make watering and access easier. We’re also expanding the garden by almost double the square footage we did last year.
I just sourced the straw bales I need and I’ll be getting them Saturday. I’ll start conditioning them on St. Patrick’s Day and they’ll be ready for my peas and beets to be planted by the 27th. It’s all coming together!