Harvesting our “first fruits”
We have been quite busy harvesting the first vegetables from our plot garden. Spinach, Swiss Chard, Bok Choi, and Lettuce have all been to the table in these past two weeks, along with just a few fresh strawberries. Greg and I love to eat from the garden. Savings on our food dollars makes it worthwhile to keep gardening each spring thru fall. With the cost of fresh spinach topping out at $2.00 a package it only seems sensible to grow our own.
Adding additional fruits and herbs to the existing garden
This year we have added many new fruits and herbs to the garden area. I recently attended a garden club meeting that won me a sage plant which is thriving with my other herbs. The sage sits alongside of my chives, rosemary, flat leaf basil, and curly parsley. Also, being from the upper mid-west (Northern Indiana natives), I have wanted for quite some time to add asparagus and rhubarb for a “taste of home”. Gurney’s seed catalog provided many varieties of these and we finally settled on the Crimson Red Rhubarb and Mary Washington Improved Asparagus. Through the Burpee seed catalog I selected some Heritage Red Raspberry plants that Greg planted at the end of the large garden. And just for a surprise, while mowing my son’s lawn in Maryland, I accidentally uprooted a blackberry bush and quickly placed the root ball in a water filled plastic bag. Now the blackberry is planted next to the raspberries and doing well.
We have had concord grapes growing for the past three years and they are finally putting out some small sprigs of grape seeds that will hopefully become some juice or jam this fall. Greg built the arbor this spring to support the enlarging plants.
Another new addition to the “fruits” of our garden, are two Kiwi plants. These are a variety that grows like grapes on arbors, producing small, non-fuzzy, red-skinned fruits. I can thank my sister-in-law who lives in Spring Hope, NC for this addition to our garden. She has them on their property and really likes the ease of growing these. I can hardly wait to eat some. Our two year old June-Ever-Bearing strawberries really like being in the barrel that Greg rigged up for them last fall. He transplanted the shoots to the barrel in October and kept the plants covered throughout our harsh winter this year. Now they are just busting out all over.
Our traditional “front garden”
This front garden is the first garden we planted when we moved to our home in Warrenton. In fact, it was planted BEFORE the house was built. It took us several years to get the ground to produce good harvests. Greg has spent every fall adding compost and shredded leaves to the large plot so that each spring he can rototill the ground into a good mixture for the corn and beans we plant there. The garden is nearly planted now with some of the seeds we sowed less than two weeks ago have already sprouted. The Butter Beans and the yellow Sweet Corn are both looking healthy. We planted 4 rows of the corn and two rows of the bush beans on May 8th and will add 4 more rows of corn and 2 more rows of beans in the next two weeks to keep the harvests spread out.
Adding Container Tomatoes to complete our garden
Greg started some tomato seeds in his “cold box” earlier this spring and now he has transplanted them into the large containers he has lining his plot garden. These tomatoes are the roma and early girl varieties that will be used for canning juices and sauces later this summer. And I ordered from Gurney’s seed catalog 3 large Rainbow Bells grape tomato plants which I have placed in some of my hanging pots by my flower garden. The tomatoes that I hope to harvest in my pots will be very colorful shades of red, yellow, and orange for salads and salsa this summer.
Recipes coming in the June issue
Starting in the June 2nd issue, I hope to have a recipe posted for an easy jam suited for shelf or for the freezer. And then the recipe posting will become standard on each subsequent first Monday of the month issue. I really enjoy canning and preserving our fruits and vegetables, and hope to have simple recipes that anyone can use.
Well, back to the garden for more spinach and lettuce picking! See You in June.
Look for a full picture layout in our next issue that shows all of the current progress of our garden items and a few secrets of gardening!
In our next issue on June 2nd:
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More harvesting of garden vegetable plants
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To water or not to water when the air is hot
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Easy Freezer Jam recipe
See you in 2 weeks!