Growing Food in 2017

We LOVE growing food. LOVE IT. I feel it's the most rebellious thing we can do these days as activists, as parents and as humans. We started about 6 years ago, I planted a few things in a tiny garden bed in a house we were renting. Both myself and my husband grew up with parents that enjoyed a garden, so it wasn't something foreign to us. The following year we bought our house with a decent sized backyard and attempted a veggie patch- in which we made dozens of mistakes. With gardening there's no better way to learn than by totally screwing it up! Each year we got a bit better, a bit bigger and this year was our biggest and best yet! Last year as well as this season we made use of my husband's mother's garden since she had decided on not doing as much from now on.
I got to work meticulously planning, I made spreadsheets and maps, organized and researched, collected tons of seeds, and STILL made tons of mistakes!

LIVE AND LEARN!

My favourite crops this year are as follows;

The top of the list has to go to the black beans, they do amazingly well here on the prairies.

Very minimal weeding, they grew fast and healthy, no pests went after them and we should get an amazing haul out of it!

I will be growing black beans every year, I love them ​​in burgers, soups, tacos, either way they rock!!!

Next, the corn. It's incredible! I have no idea what I'm going to do with it all, as it's not good fresh and it won't pop like popcorn. Field corn they call it, and as I recall I have no chickens or sheep to feed it to. Hahaha

This was one of our big mistakes this year when planning the garden, having gotten them for free from the Sherwood Park Seedy Sunday, we didn't look up the three varieties we planted to see what they would be good for.

We planted Flint Corn, which is the yellow one and Painted Mountain which is all that beautiful coloured stuff. Strawberry Indian corn is the third variety but it's not quite ready yet. I'm hoping they will get enough time to ripen before the frost hits.

The Amaranth we grew was also totally unbelievable!

The young leaves were tasty although they did get bitter as the plants grew. We are still waiting to harvest this crop as the seeds have not quite ripened yet. We used West Coast Seeds 'Hopi Red Dye' amaranth and it grew beautifully!

We did have a few get eaten but not too many and we were able to spread out a couple clusters of over-seeded spots to fill in the gaps. Hopefully we get a ton of seeds out of it, I would for sure grow this variety again!

The quinoa! Oh the quinoa!! I'll admit, I really had no idea we could grow quinoa here in Canada. In zone 3-4, I would not have expected it to be able to do so well, but it did!

It was, unfortunately, one of the favourites among the various critters that snuck into the rural garden in the spring. Those little buggers, whomever they were, deer, bunnies, bugs, ate almost all the young quinoa! We were quite disappointed to say the least.

The few survivors did flourish however, and we expect to collect quite a bit of quinoa in the next week or so! And look at that colour!

Every heard of Calendula? It's super popular these days, a pretty little orange or yellow flower, aka marigold, and it can be used in all kinds of ways.

These beautiful flowers were easy to grow and fairly easy to harvest and then dry. I used the dehydrator to fully dry them, they stayed sticky for quite some time.

Then I just put them in big jars and into the pantry.

I love to infuse oil with them and then make it into lotions, ointments and deodorant.

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Did you know Canada is one of the largest exporter of lentils?
I had no idea until we changed our diet and began eating them so much. They're such a little powerhouse food, loaded with nutrients and can be used in so many dishes!

We received some Black Beluga and some Red lentil seeds this spring and planted a whole bunch! We have picked them and have them drying now in our shed.

The rest of the garden was filled with the usuals, cucumbers, peas, carrots, celery, sunflowers, lettuce, garlic, zucchini, potatoes and more.

We also grew sweet potatoes for the first time this year. I was very surprised by the process to say the least! @venomnymous has been working on a blog post to share our experience, it was really cool so keep an eye out for that :)

Many of the things we planted were gobbled up by hungry critters in the spring, such as the soybeans, so we replanted but many things, like the soybeans, just didn't get enough time in our short growing season.

Its September now, getting colder and soon the frost will hit hard. We love growing things and are already planning for next year! I hope you all had a productive year as well!

~Happy Growing!