We have been getting up before dawn and working our fingers to the bone to harvest all the food that will sustain us for the next year.
Here is a picture of today's bounty:
Ok, maybe I exaggerated a little ~ this took us all of 2 minutes to pick from the garden. It should feed us until... tomorrow. But I can't tell you how much fun it is to go out to the garden and pick fresh fruits and vegetables.
This was our first year to have a garden. Most people start in the spring but NO~ not us, no sire-e. We are still considered "city folk" around here and we didn't get our garden into the ground until all our neighbors were picking their harvest!
We even had a joy-robbing-bandit tell us not to bother planting our seeds because they wouldn't grow. (gasp!) Encouragement is obviously not his spiritual gift!
I heard about a gardening method called square foot gardening. A method which allows you to grow more food in less space AND, this is the best part, without weeds. So it took me from spring to summertime to read, investigate and BEG Wes to let me invest money into the square foot garden. Why Lord? Why couldn't you just make me normal?
We had to buy untreated lumber to make the boxes. Then it took about 20 trips to try and find the 1 inch pieces of wood to make a square foot grid to lay on top of the garden boxes. We never did find those by the way, so poor Wes had to cut pieces of wood into 1 inch strips.
Then we bought the soil. It had to be a perfect blend of 1/3 part compost, 1/3 part peat moss and 1/3 part soil. This is where Wes' confusion came in. He would wonder (loudly) about why we were buying dirt when we have 8 acres of it that we could use for FREE! No, no, no... we must have the perfect blend, my love!
Finally, we had it all ready and LauraLee and I planted all the seeds. We didn't know what we were doing so we pushed those seeds WAY down into the soil. Until Wes, the know-it-all, came along and told us we were doing it all wrong.
It took a few months and an excessive amount of water since we were growing our produce during the hottest part of the year! But finally... it started to grow.
We have basil, cucumbers, banana peppers, watermelon, green bell peppers, corn and cantaloupe growing. We planted a larger variety but some things didn't grow. I am sure it has nothing to do with the fact that we shoved those seeds 100 feet into the ground!!
It is such an amazing feeling to know that we are eating produce from our own garden. Free from pesticides, preservatives and WEEDS! I am able to send one of my farmhands out to the garden for a fresh watermelon for snack time. AMAZING...
I am so inspired.
I think I will change my name to Rachel Yoder and begin sewing us Amish dresses and prayer caps tomorrow. We might even deliver some fresh cucumbers to our nay-saying neighbor!
and maybe, just maybe, enter this cucumber in the county fair...
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