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: straw bale garden
Canning Season Has Begun
Canning season officially starts today (for me). Today, starting with the first two straw bales of beets. Hard to tell from the photo, but there is just over 8 pounds of beets here. Will be a little less after cooking and trimming, so probably around six or seven pint jars. We shall see! We got more from our first two bales than we got last year. And there are four more bales full of beets ready for me to deal with after this. I’ll try to add some more photos as I go so that you can suffer through the cooking, peeling, canning process with me. Misery loves company! Ha!! 
(Seriously, I enjoy this shit.) ~ James
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!