This will be my sixth season of growing vegetables. I am trying to grow most of the vegetables I eat, year round, in the very small back yard of a house that is smack dab in the middle of a hillbilly town in upstate New York. Last year was my first year trying to preserve some of the food I had grown myself. My original motivation for growing my own foodstuffs was that I could see the writing on the wall, and knew those of us who could produce our own foods were more likely to not die of starvation when the NWO plans came to fruition, which will be soon by the likes of it. In other words, I'm a bit of a prepper. If it comes to hiding out in a shack in the woods somewhere to survive, I'll be a goner. But if we can remain in our homes, I've gotten this one well outfitted and stocked for me to survive.
One of the prepper preparedness people I follow here suggested that we begin to eat the foods we have stored, in order to determine if we could actually live on the stuff. This I have begun to do. In two short weeks of trying to live almost exclusively on the foods I have stored, I've learned a tremendous amount, the most important of which is:
One cannot live on pickles alone.
I am already sick of pickles: cucumber pickles, beet pickles, watermelon rind pickles - yuck! I'll can half as many pickles next year, or better yet, have half of the pickles from this year left over for next year so that I won't have to can any pickles at all. The problem with that is that this year's pickles, my first ever, are all pretty bad. Edible, but just barely. Too much vinegar!
I'll be adding pressure canning to this year's learning curve, so that not everything I have in my cupboard is made with either vinegar or sugar, sometimes even both.
I'm already out of my own onions, potatoes, and cabbage, so I'll up the amounts of those that I plant next year, and have two varieties of each as well. Thankfully, the hills around here are teeming with excellent farmers, who supply me with splendid vegetables, honey, maple syrup, meats, poultry, dairy products and eggs. As long as I can continue to get foods from them, I should want for nothing.
Next year, too, I will grow more greens inside! I am surprised at how much I miss having a good salad, or cooked fresh greens, during the winter. I've gotten out my grow lights and started in on fresh greens for eating now, but next year I'll get those going much earlier. They are so refreshing!
Fresh vegetables from the garden, even in deep winter
Back in early December, my hoop house looked like this:
and I planned to leave it up for winter so that I could spare myself the trouble of having to re-erect it in the spring for very early plantings. Alas, it now looks like this:
Incredibly, there are still edible greens under that mess:
I'd heard herbs would be usable all winter. I didn't quite believe it, but here they are. Although there are not many, there are enough sprigs of this and that to give me the taste of fresh veggie goodness for another month at least:
I'd harvested a lot of my Jerusalem Artichokes when I moved them to the back fence, envisioning them towering over the ripening seed pods of poppies in August and September. Those rhizomes I harvested, the first picture in this post, are scrawny and dry compared to the shallow and very plump rhizomes poking out of the ground today. I believe (correct me if you know!) that I could harvest these in deep winter on those days that the ground has thawed a little - no need for indoor storage.
Planning for the 2024 growing season
My garden planning for the upcoming growing season is in full swing. I got some onions going from seed mostly to figure out how to do that - I've ordered lots of onion sets so I won't need that skill this year, but one never knows about the next year, now does one? I also kept some seed potatoes to learn that skill, even though I've ordered lots of seed potatoes too. I ordered seeds for new stuff (just realized I didn't order any bean seeds!), two types of strawberries, and asparagus, which I have no idea where to plant in this very small space. I hope to get a few more medicinal plants in this year, specifically yarrow, rose, witch hazel and bergamot.
It's all a learning extravaganza over here. Except for not being able to leave my garden for more than a few days at a time from April to September, I'm eager for growing season to get underway. I love hanging out in my garden, producing food for me, my family, my friends, and my pets to eat.
This is my entry to Hive Garden Community's monthly garden challenge for February 2024. Come join us! Show off your gardens, and see the many wondrous gardens of the world!
Congrats on getting prepared for the upcoming season. It is always fun to decide which new varieties one is going to grow. I too just started my onion seeds and a few lettuce also. I just started another round of microgreens yesterday and will have some ready soon. Growing your own food is a learning curve every single year. Unfortunately, snowload is never friendly on plastic hoop systems and it is easier to start from scratch each year, been there and done that. lol Happy gardening.
I started my microgreens a day before your post on microgreens, so of course I did it all wrong. I'll try your method next week. It would save me a lot of soil, be less work, and probably give a better germination rate than the way I did it. It's all part of the perpetual learning curve, aided by fellow hiveans, I'm sure to grow as a gardener.
Thanks for that reblog!
You are welcome, I have been growing my own food for over 50 years and I am always learning something new. I am taking notes on this round of microgreens so I can be more specific with each variety. I started four kinds at the same time. Apparently, my grandkids love them so now I may have a full-time job. ;-)
I look forward to seeing your progress in all your gardening endeavors.
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 55/75) Liquid rewards.
Thank you so very much!
LOL I greatly resemble this remark. My first try at canning was very enthusiastic, so much so that I still have years worth of blackberry jam and tuna from it. I have learned to appropriately scale my harvests to my consumption, or at least to try. I didn't realize three gallons of blackberries was more than I will spread on toast in a year, but I do now.
This is also a lesson learned. A lot of the jam I made was horribly full of seeds, and for a year I was drudgily picking them out of my teeth. Fortunately the expensive wild caught tuna was not a bad recipe, and isn't $10/lb cat food.
I wish I had more than a fraction of your garden space. I need to adopt better indoor gardening but this will require opening an exterior wall in my home for reasons, and I cannot do that in winter and pretend to be a rational person. I have some very small crops I am maintaining just for the purpose of keeping seed coming for when I do have enough space to grow more than samples of onion, cabbage, beets, and many more delicious foods I want to eat regularly, like turnips, carrots and greens. However one problem I have is garden pests. Deer top the list, and I have erected a variety of mechanisms that seek to stop them from eating me out of house and home, short of harvesting the deer instead of tomatoes. European land snails are next on the list, and I strongly suspect I should harvest the delicious snails. There are few more delicious and expensive foods I could be harvesting, in fact. Finally come the worms, and the cabbage loopers are rivaling root miners in terms of poundage of waste.
I don't want to resort to poisons, and contraptions to exclude deer don't scale down to inverts. I can eat the snails, but not the maggots in my turnips, and the cabbage loopers and snails just make it impossible to grow any kind of bean or pea because they eat them before there's much more than a seedling. I reckon I can exclude such pests by growing indoors, and hope to get that going this spring.
Thanks!
Three gallons of blueberries! lol. Had we not had a terrible year for all things fruit bearing tree, I'd also have a gazillion too many pears canned!
So, a 6 foot run of deer fencing wouldn't keep out the deer? Maybe you guys have super deer? I know the damage they can do though.
those moments when
you walk into your garden
and find lifeless stalks
I like your turns-of-phrase. Your writing is always a delight to read.
Because of the tiny space I have available, the 6' fence keeps me out as well. Thank you for your kind words.
It seems that you are well prepared for the upcoming season, your enthusiasm also makes me to be better in my vegetable gardening in the upcoming season too! So excited to see your next gardening blog.
I also ran out of onions, mainly because so many rotted. I thought I'd done something wrong but my gardener friend told me today that last year was a terrible year for onions as it rained every day during July and August.
I did consider canning but it seemed a little beyond my limited capabilities.
I look forward to following your progress this season.
I didn't have a single one rot! I was really surprised, they lasted very well. Supposedly a variety that does that. My potatoes, another variety is stores well, are just starting to get a little soft.
I remember that you pressure can stuff, no? Am I thinking of someone else?
You're thinking of someone else. I'm Mrs Freeze everything in sight. How did you store the onions?
In a back closet that stays pretty cold, in paper bags. Potatoes too, amaryllis, canna, everything. I don't like freezing stuff it does not taste good when I thaw it. Slimy sometimes. Berries I freeze, meats I buy frozen, chix broth and pet food are the only things in my freezer.
I honestly can't wait to come back and restart my own food prepping journey. YOu're right - you can't live off pickles alone, but it's a good start! HOw do you cook your jerusalem artichokes? Do they make you fart or is there a special way to prep them to get rid of this? We got rid of ours as our stomach didn't like them, but definitely need some kind of robust tuber to supplement a garden prepper pantry!
My interest in them is two-fold: they can be harvested in the winter, and they are spectacular in bloom. I haven't had the farting problem yet (although you are not the first to ask about this), and have mostly used them cut very small in rice pilaf, or in dog food. I used to ferment them, and had no gastro problems then - they were quite good! I need to get back into fermentation, everything tastes good fermented, especially rutabagas. My kids even liked those.
Oh fermented sounds awesome! I saw a recipe once that had them parboiled and then roast with bay leaves and bacon. Perhaps olives would substitute in.
They are, shall we say, short on flavor. More filler than anything else. Bacon would be helpful.
Ha!
You're an inspiration!!
I have a few potted herbs in my house. Can't gather a few leaves without cat hair and dust. -_-
Also, the basil, oregano, parsley, and cilantro are surprisingly short-lived even indoors.
Growing my own salad greens would be great. If anything would grow for me (and thrive, or at least, stay alive!).
Hey Carol, I don't think you got my little joke about reading the only book on my shelves that I hadn't read yet. I made that post the day after you and I derided a person who said that, in her bio or something, as haughty. A little private joke just for you. I do that a lot. And you miss them a lot! lol I am so bad at jokes!
I'm sorry I didn't see (or remember) your "joke about reading the only book on my shelves that I hadn't read yet" -
I'm sorry! It's not you. It's me.
Yes, I remember telling you about an author whose bio includes the claim that she has read EVERY BOOK on her shelves. (Well, good for you honey.) Funny, earlier this morning I had revisited my 3-star review of her book. Everyone else 5-stars her and sings her praises. Why did I find her so annoying? Her humility seems like an act...?
I revisited Annie Dillard, who remains fresh, original, timeless, insightful, memorable.
I also cannot review another book, by an author who lives near me - everyone else is piling on the 5-star reviews, and I found his little time-travel novel so Hallmark, so high-school, so lacking in sophistication and breadth and depth. Does anyone need to know what I think? I can do him a favor and just say NOTHING about his book, even though every author claims to want our honest feedback. (It's a lie. They want praise. And rave reviews.)
Yet another author, half an hour to the north, has been publishing and promoting her fiction, and it's just not 5-star material, so I have bought and read the book but not posted a review.
My mom actually liked this book. I was surprised. I bought her a signed copy, direct from the author, and the novel included WWII women and quilts. So, there's that angle.
And ANOTHER author from my hometown is clogging the social media group for alum with all these books he publishes. I bought his memoir. Awful. I sampled his children's books. Also not good. So three authors who live near me want buyers, readers, reviewers, but ugh ugh ugh, I cannot be honest without bringing down the wrath of the community.
So. Who cares what Carol thinks.
I'm such a critic.
---I still have not found your reference to the one book on your shelf you've yet to read.
Off to donate blood - on Valentine's Day!
Also, Ash Wednesday.
Most blood comes from repeat donors, and that's a problem, because donating so often depletes our iron, and I'm already chronically low on iron (hemoglobin) but I keep taking the pills and staying at the bottom of the range (12-17).