Garden Dreams Activate!

Hold on to your hats, folks! Tanglebranch is posting TWICE today! Prepare yourself for a #gardendream entry that will thrill and amaze you!!

Or at least produce a "hmm! Interesting!" or two while you read it. I hope.

Source: Mark McNeill's facebook page

Our garden dreams are:

1. To (eventually) produce all of our own vegetables, fruits, and grain crops.(Meat too, but that's a whole different rabbit hole)
2. To market our excess produce through farmgate, farmer's market, and (possibly) contract sales
3. To process plenty of our produce into value-added products such as sauces and jams, which can feed us through the winter and spring, as well as be sold year round, as well as more simply preserved foods, like blanched/frozen vegetables and dried or candied fruits.
4. To do the above as naturally/organically as possible.

Now, for the TL;DR part! (Please read it though, I promise it's good!)

When it comes to garden dreams at Tanglebranch Meadows, the sky is the limit. We really want to work toward full self-sufficiency on our farm, while still having some marketable commodities and enjoying a wholesome life with a few creature comforts. We have plenty of land base (160 acres, to be exact!), and while most of it is dedicated to feeding our livestock, we've partitioned off 6 acres that we want to turn into a market garden.

My husband (Mark) is the head gardener around here, although I do the lion's share of the work at this point. He works full time off the farm because we just aren't quite financially able to go without that income yet, but, fingers crossed, next year should be his last year of having to work away from home! So these dreams are primarily his, but he's happy to let me share them with you.

He bought a high tunnel structure from a foreclosed nursery a couple years ago.
Source: Mark McNeill's facebook page.

We dismantled it and brought it home, but haven't managed to remantle it yet. He intends start a lot of garden crops early in there, so that things like cabbage, squashes, melons, and tomatoes (of course) can get a jump start on our relatively short growing season. The tomatoes will likely continue to live in the greenhouse so they can produce later into the fall, but other crops will be transplanted and field grown. We also intend to grow 1/2 acre plots of various cereals (wheat, rye, barley, etc) that we can mill for our own flour for bread and baking.

We've also planted many fruit trees, and will keep adding more each year as money allows.
We enjoyed 4 whole apples from our trees this year, and we hope the cherries, plums, and raspberries will come on strong next year. We've also started and pollinator pleasure garden with lots of flowering shrubs and perennials to help provide habitat for bees, butterflies, and other helpful critters.

Someday, we want to build a commercial kitchen structure where we can safely process our veg and fruit for sale, but there's a lot of other things that have to fall into place first before that can happen!

So, what about our current garden situation?
Source: Mark McNeill's facebook page.

To be honest, this year wasn't good. It looked so promising in the spring! Coming off a record rainfall accumulation last summer, and plenty of snow in the winter, we thought things would be great. But. We experienced extremely dry conditions and blistering heat, which baked the water out of the soil by the first week of July. Our total rainfall, from spring to fall, was less than 7 inches. We have no well and must haul whatever water we use here, whether for household, livestock, or irrigation, which takes time and fuel that we didn't always have. I got two meals of fresh peas from two 50 foot rows of peas. I got one meal of starchy, tasteless, corn on the cob. The beans produced reasonably well, but had an unpleasant woody-ness that didn't disappear upon cooking. We seeded brassicas TWICE and nothing germinated. The onions stayed small. It was pretty bleak on the west half of the garden.

And yet, some things did well. The tomatoes flourished in the heat. The squash and pumpkins, and to a lesser degree, cukes, did well too, despite the drought. Lettuce, before it bolted and went bitter, was a daily addition to our plate. The potatoes didn't overacheive, but they didn't underacheive either. The carrots were also average producers. So we certainly won't starve! In fact, when I step on the bathroom scale, I think maybe a little mild starvation might be a good thing...

Now for some more photos!
Some of the squash and pumpkins we grew:


The last of the Roma tomatoes ripening off:

The potatoes:


And here, one if my proudest moments, a meal whose ingredients (save seasonings) were ENTIRELY produced on our farm!

Thanks for reading! Be sure to check out the other entries for @goldendawne 's #gardendream contest!

(All images my own unless otherwise indicated)