Family Garden Time!
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It was very rewarding to build a new veggie garden from scratch and work on it as a family last year for the first time. It was just as fun to blog about it and leverage the opinions and expertise of the folks I have met here. Hopefully there were also a few who were inspired then or for this year to just do it for themselves as well because if I can do it, you can too and I will help.
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Last Year
As a review and reminder to folks around last summer, and a recap for my newer friends, I build a box out of some old materials I had laying around from the rink I used to have in the back yard. Reclaiming a 3x20 plot of useless grass was an easy decision and I would love to replace all of my lawn to tell you the truth.
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We learned a few things like:
- Asparagus is something that takes 3 or more years of growing before you get a harvest worth eating.
- Planting all Beefsteak tomatoes seems like a good idea until 10 plants all start pumping out ripe fruit at once.
- Planting corn is neat but will yield nothing but food for squirrels (plus we are surrounded by corn fields so no need to grow it)
- It is fun as hell to photograph/blog/vlog about it as a way of sharing and monitoring your own progress
We had a great yield for our first year highlighted by awesome tomatoes which may or may not have tasted even better because of the Oregano plants we surrounded them with. Some said yes but it may just have been the power of suggestion? Cucumbers and all kinds of sweet and hot peppers, green beans, berries were bountiful and such a nice treat from mid-summer on.
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This Year
It seems that spring is taking its sweet time arriving fully, or we are just keen to start early this year with the indoor planting of our seeds. Giggles of excitement while buying seeds is worth the whole endeavor really for the family and the produce and Life lessons are the real benefit.
This year, we have the following changes/objectives:
- Tomatoes - 1/4 Beefsteak (awesome for eating in everything) 1/4 Cherry (some sweet variety for snacking and fancy salads/skewers) and 1/2 Roma (Pick/freeze/sauce)
- Hot Peppers - Jalapenos and Chilis like last year but adding Mad Hatter and Ghost peppers for added flavour and heat in the Pickleman Hotsauce that will be exclusively available in this community and on STEEM) I am also personally excited to take the cucumbers and hot peppers and make some spicy relish.
- Carrots - I should have a lot more/deeper earth and would like to start with some root veggies
- Cucumbers - I am trying to grow the big English Cucumbers from the seeds in the package as well as those harvested from the ones grown last year. We are also planting mini cucumbers so that we can make our own pickles.
- Flowers - Living with chicks and needing to help the bees in any way possible, we should have PLENTY of wildflowers (AKA flowering weeds) with some Milkweed (good for Monachs,) along with returning Morning Glories, Moonflowers, Begonias, Petunias, Nasturtiums, Calendula, Sunflowers, and holy shit we have a lot of breeds of flower.
- Beans - Avoiding the Peas and doubling up on a couple of different beans planted in the ground (as opposed to a large pot) to see how they do in comparison.
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Shopping for seeds is one of the most fun excursions for the kids while building the garden.
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With the seeds left over from last year, and the ones harvested from the produce last year, add the new ones and there are plenty. I learned that you really have to label the packets you collect otherwise your are guessing what you are planting.
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Read the packets and poke holes in the soil for the seeds at the right depth. We use reusable plastic inserts that have a couple ounces of soil in them for the planting them individually. Lesson learned last year was to label each of the sections in waterproof ink otherwise it washes away and you have mystery plants.
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The new addition this year is the tiny greenhouse! We stumbled upon it in our seed finding travels at a local thrift store for $40 CDN. Helps contain the mess of all the trays, and trap some more moisture so the plants can thrive in their early days. I also stole one of the aquarium lights to provide more growing light as the days grow longer and am parking it right over the heating vent so that the temperature is slightly higher like summer. We will see how this works.
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This is the first official sprout of the year and it only took a couple days. It is only a flower (Zinnia I think?) so nothing to get too excited about. Unless you are my daughter.
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So starts another year of growing and learning and cooperation and eating and sharing here. I hope you enjoy my bumblings and victories as we strive to build the skills of our young ones with organic activity and life skills. I would probably save money buying tomatoes at the store but the garden ones taste better, have less chemicals, and nobody on steem would give a rip for me blogging about lame supermarket chores if I passed them off as adventures.
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Do you Garden? Any requests/advice for mine?
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Looks tasty and an entry for https://steemit.com/gardenjournal2019/@simplymike/steemit-community-garden-journal-challenge-ending-soon @simplymike is also from the PHC house
Well hot damn! I may just have so wander over there and check it out. Britt’s got my back.
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Thanks, @brittandjosie. This post is right up the alley of the challenge. Very valuable entry!
Why would you say that corn is food to squirrels? Do you mean that they stole it from you? 😊
You had a great harvest but I'm not sure if oregano would have any impact on your tomatoes so I think it's just a saying 😊
Have fun with planting this year! Congratulations on your curie vote!
Yah @curie is like winning the steemit lottery! The people I meet in comments when that happens is worth way more to me than the generous upvote.
The corn grew along the fence which is like a squirrel super highway. All I did was plant a couple rest stops along the way for them with bonus snacks.
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Oh, I know what you mean :) When I was getting quite a few curie votes in the past I always got so many people visiting my post. The truth is, curie is a good source of good quality posts so I follow their trail. I got tired with searching for good posts so I settled and curie and c-squared and it works for me :)
It's nice to feed animals like this :) I'm sure they love you for that and maybe one day you will get a nut from them :D
Wow, growing everything from seeds. Great! 10 of the same tomato plants is a bad idea unless you are planning to sell them or make a lot of sauce. The only thing I grow a ton of is mint because other than coffee and alcohol, mint tea is the only beverage I drink. Well maybe juice, but that's not a beverage.
I am also growing ghost peppers (CarolinaReaper) and only smaller tomatoes. I will also try corn and sunflowers mostly because I like experimenting with new things. Anyway, looking forward to updates, and yes I would sort of be interested in seeing what groceries people buy lol. I got fresh ginseng roots for 50% off today (it's expensive), who wouldn't be excited about that?
I am not extreme enough to try and replace grocery shopping though the notion sounds good.
If I overload on Roma tomatoes and cut back on the beefsteak, and bumper crop will be preserved for sauce for sure. Beefsteak not so great for that so friends received some fresh deliveries last year.
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I don't think most people should try to replace grocery shopping. However, try to replace some things. I no longer need to buy various spices or herbs from the grocery store. also june ~ september I barely buy any vegetables, and I've found a lot of people to trade with or just buy their stuff and cut out the middle man.
Great post. Considering how methodical you have been, everything sugsests that this year will be better than last.
All those vegetables you got last year looked just yummy.
Wish you a great harvest this fall (or summer?).
I like to measure my success by how mistakes have lead to knowledge and better results next time. The harvest starts mid summer and goes until early fall depending upon the plant.
Thanks for taking the time in this year’s launch!
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Oh yes it is very enjoyable to me. I have to say that your post brings back memories of working in my moms garden as a kid. Good times.
It is the memories and lessons that are my prime motivator. Doesn’t hurt that it also makes for some great sandwich and pizza toppings!
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Hello!
This post has been manually curated, resteemed
and gifted with some virtually delicious cake
from the @helpiecake curation team!
Much love to you from all of us at @helpie!
Keep up the great work!
Manually curated by @vibesforlife.
Much appreciated! I do all my curation manually too.
I know @helpie, love cake, and am going to have to check out @vibesforlife
Thanks for taking the time to support me and the steem blockchain!
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Gardening is awesome. I love watching 😉 you guys have a lot patience. It is a great activity for sure.
Yes indeed! Patience is a virtue very well exercised in a season of gardening. If I can teach enough, maybe I can just watch when they get older?
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I think you are doing very well with what you are growing. I need to get myself sorted as this looks like really good fun. I think once you have grown and tasted your own nothing tastes better. I must admit I don't like shopping for veggies that have little or no flavour.
Loving this far up north, you can tell when the local stuff starts making it to the grocery stores. When you taste your own, it is as much better again.
Don’t worry if you start late. You can just buy seedlings that have hardened and have great success.
Seeds are just cheaper, a little more challenging, and make the girls so excited when they start to sprout.
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Great post and a family activity of the highest order.
I also found that planting corn is a waste of time and resources.
I also love the idea of starting out with seeds rather than buying the established plant. The germination process is exciting to watch as the seeds sprout from the ground.
Tomatoes are one of my favorite vegetables, and growing different kinds is always a good idea. It is always a treat to go to the garden and eat a handful of those little cherry tomatoes.
The deeper the boxes are for the carrots the better the carrot.
Carrots are one of the vegetable that preserves the best. If you happen to grow an excess of vegetables , the easiest way to preserve is to blanch, vacumn pack and freeze. Here is a site that explains the blanching instructions for every fruit and vegetable you can imagine.
http://www.pickyourown.org/index.htm
There is nothing like going to the freezer in the middle of the winter and grabbing some vegetables that were grown during the summer. Preserving by blanching and freezing will keep the vegetables as fresh as the day you harvested them. We are still pulling veggies from our frig and they taste as fresh as ever.
Good luck with this year's garden.
Holy shit that comment probably has more good information in it than my original post! The #powerhousecreatives group could really use a blogger like you if you are interested in applying. So many positive folks supporting each other and many nature/garden lovers from across the globe.
Thanks again for the great insight. @matkodurko calls me uncle here and I feel I am cousins with @ryan313 (I get that right?) so I may refer to you as uncle as well for all the great advice. ;)
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You're more than welcome.
Stepping out later today for the weekend, going to my first Yankee game on Saturday at the new stadium.
When I get back I would love to check out #powerhousecreatives, sounds like a good group of people.
Feel free to call me uncle, just refrain from calling me grandpa. 😁
Enjoy the trip and the Yankees!
Powerhouse creatives have been a great community for me and you may recognize some folks like @old-guy-photos, @brittandjosie, @fullcoverbetting, @abh12345, @mariannewest and other positive and active steemians.
If I was to call you grandpa, you would probably be a great great grandpa in real life when in reality, you probably only have a few years on me.
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Looks like you have a very nice project going on there. Congratulations!
It's interesting to see those wooden boxes used for gardening, we never had those but I find it a very good idea, especially if you have reusable material.
Those tomatoes and cucumbers look fantastic and I know taste fantastic as well.
One thing you have to know about spices, herbs. They need to be separated from the rest of the vegetable as can harm them. I was told mint is like that, it needs its own place, far from the vegetables as once it starts to grow, no one can stop it, it's worst than weed and can alter the taste of what is growing next to it.
Cornishon cucumbers are my favorites, we always grow those and make pickles and eat them fresh as well. I believe those are the best.
Harvesting seeds to grow veggies next year is a very good thing. We've been doing that for years and it's the best if you want to be independent. Your seed trays look great and so does your greenhouse. We don't have a green house but we use a room that is heated to grow seedlings.
Also teaching the kids about gardening is the best you can do. They need to learn how nature works and to respect nature. Congratulations for that.
Gardening is a learning curve, there's always something you didn't know and there's always a new technique you can use to get a better result. It's fun!
Congratulations, I love what you do!
So nice of you to say!!
I decided long ago that I would never stop learning. That involves making mistakes constantly and enjoying being proven wrong over and over.
In that regard, gardening has got to be one of the most rewarding endeavours. So many variables to master and lessons to share with the family. Plus you get lots of fresh food while you are learning! An added bonus is the conversation on steem with smart folks like you that accelerate the learning.
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You're so right. No matter how much you know, you always have to learn if you want the best result. Life is changing constantly and we have to keep up.
And you're right again, gardening is rewarding, there's nothing better than the have your own homegrown veggies and fruits.