What are we planning?
I am re-posting this page because we learn from our gardening mistakes and looking
back can show how far we have come from earlier days.
It is now 2010.
We will be taking many photos this year 2009 as we work on being more sustainable.
We started much earlier than we usually do to grow vegetables (possibly too early).
We already have our potatoes planted and they are already coming up. We have
lettuce growing, horseradish is coming up, beets are starting to emerge, we have
onions planted and already getting tall, we have garlic that is growing well and
turnip and mustard greens that are sprouting.
I have included on this page some of our photos from last year to show failures
and success stories.
We will be documenting and taking photos in 2009 of these things:
Expanding our growing space
How to grow butternut squash in a small yard
How to grow watermelon in a small yard
Improved composting
Food Storage and rotation
Worm Composting
Saving Seed
How much food do we need to grow? and....
Moving a lot of flowers and replacing them with vegetables.
Pictures taken last year (2008)
Our fig tree second year after planting.
Squash seemed to be growing well
Even made a female bloom but never had the first squash to eat.
Beans we could grow!
And produced many beans!
We made herb beds and vegetable beds by turning stepping stones on their sides.
We had tomatos all summer long well into fall. This is when we learned that
there are "determinate" and "indeterminate" tomatoes. The determinate tomato is more bushy and it set's fruit and grows a certain amount of tomatoes then
will die. The indeterminate tomato, (more like me) has no set time it just grows and vines and produces all summer
and into winter then slowly dies away.
We had supervisors
We had chickens in our twelve apostles, oh those pesky not city approved chickens! We grew those twelve apostles for
my mother, they are also called walking iris. This is a shady area and I have not found a vegetable that will grow well
in that area.
We had conversations about how we were doing with our gardening skills.
We had strange mushrooms
That were actually pretty
And appeared to be ready for rain.
We had pretty flowers
And large flowers
We had pretty water drops in our birdbath
We had a watchful eye and some pretty sage blooms
Our eggplant produced well
And we ate the eggplants even though we did not like them at first but have learned
to like them by slicing them in half and drizzling olive oil over them, bake them
until tender. Salt and pepper and they are very good. You can add them to a
pasta dish and many other ways. We learned that you need to pick your eggplant before it gets to big or it will
turn bitter. We also realized that we have a problem harvesting our food because
it looks so pretty on the plant thus sometimes leaving the vegetable or fruit
too long. Just pick it and hopefully more will grow.
When it got really hot outside I made a pincushion, this was the top, I still
have not made the bottom cushion.
I helped my neighbor brush up on her tatting skills.
I took a picture of a lunar moth. If I had not been gardening I would have never
seen this beautiful moth. This is the second lunar moth that we have seen in
our yard.
