The Crazy 2022 Garden!
It’s been awhile since we last posted about our adventures but we have a legitimate excuse - our garden was epic this year!
From our seed starts in April to our giant final harvest in October we grew enough food to last through to next year’s harvest. Our freezers (all 5) are full, our canning cupboards are packed, our cold storage space is crammed, but now we’ll have little need to head to the grocery store this winter. It feels great to grow our own food and create our own food security. Plus the garden food is so nutrient dense and delicious. I am not sure how we ever stomached store-bought veggies?
Not only are we feeding ourselves, our garden created habitat for many local critters from garter snakes and salamanders to hummingbirds and bats. It’s always such a bonus to grab a fresh snack in the garden and get a ‘wild kingdom’ docu-drama right in our own yard! Did you know that waxwings catch dragonflies, eat only their bodies and let the dragonfly wings flutter to the ground? Or that porcupines delicately ‘hand’ pick ripe raspberries one at a time?
Beyond food and nature shows , our garden also provided us with solace, with beauty and with joy. But there comes a time when one needs to rest - and so we are now grateful for food in our ‘hibernaculum’. Soon you’ll find us in our winter den munching away at all that food we stored.
We started off the year expanding our garden.
We created a whole new garden bed this time for potatoes. The straw bales help prevent grass from infiltrating into the garden and also act as a raised bed increasing soil temperatures. A side benefit to the bales was that they provided great habitat for snakes.
Affie in the potato garden but the middle row is a mixed veggie row for the pets (carrots, beets, parsnip, kale, and radish). Just like us, pets can benefit from fresh veggies in the diet.
We planted our raised ‘chuckwagon’ beds with kale, cucumber, tomato, tomatillo, basil, and peppers. The row covers on the main garden protected delicate seedlings from May’s cold nights.
The raised beds produced like crazy for us. We did not measure but precisely but we had tens of kilograms of tomatoes.
We also added our compost from last year’s garden to the main garden and enlarged it in size. The cardboard helps keep the grass lawn from growing into the garden. Ultimately the cardboard composts and creates new soil.
Our garden produced so much stuff to eat! Note the new ‘hot bed’ against the brown shed in the background where we grew eggplant, melons, peppers, and tomatillos.
The variety and abundance in our garden was awesome! Almost everything grew so well.
Just a small sampling of our wild visitors to the garden.
Our garden was constantly filled with the sights and sounds of pollinators.
Just a tiny portion of our fall harvest. Next year?? Maybe the addition of a market garden!?
