Gardening 2022

Gardens are fascinating things.  They are so much work and maintenance, but the satisfaction of growing your own food is unbeatable. 

You know you've become a boring adult when you have more photos of your garden than anything else on your phone except kids. 

We expanded the garden this year by about 8 feet to accommodate the bag of potatoes that had some seriously long eyes. I've never tried planting potatoes before.  Unfortunately, many of them got chomped pretty good by deer when they were flowering...so we will see if they produce or not. 

Planting our yearly batch of sunflowers.  About half of them also got chomped. 

We did black plastic this year for the zucchini and squash, cantalope and watermelon, and the cucumbers, basil, thyme, and parsley. 

Beans and Peas.  Obviously, these are old photos. 

There are few things more beautiful than new life springing up. 

Our first potato plant.

Since these photos were taken, I have picked and canned quite a few beans, froze a bunch of peas, and dried lots of basil.  We just started picking cucumbers and we ate two for lunch.  As per our normal summers, we are overrun with zucchini, so we give a bunch away to anyone who will take it at church each week.  haha. 

I love gardening!!!!

2020 Backyard Garden

This year our garden has done well.  Not quite as good as previous years, but still good.  I believe we may need to look into having our soil treated or tested to get the results that we got our first year (three years ago now). 
Our squash and zucchini were prolific this year, but they died much faster than any other year.  This is the first year that the shell peas I planted actually came up and produced.  I got three pickings off of them before they bit the dust.  

Gwendolyn had fun helping me shell them.

I planted more green beans this year than any other year, and they did great.  I tried two rows of pole beans which I will NOT try again next year.  They taste so stringy that they're hard to enjoy while being eaten. 

Our watermelon was good again.  Most of our watermelon were fed to the chickens because we just couldn't eat that many!

The girls enjoyed the ones we had though!

The corn was pretty special this year though.  Most of the corn stalks grew to be about four feet tall and then grew tassles and the smallest. skinniest ears known to man.  The girls and I harvested them all, and discovered that of the two varieties we planted. one was almost definitely a type of field corn.  So the chickens, rabbit, and birds at the birdfeeder enjoyed all of those. 

Gwen and Lucie were very helpful husking the corn.

Most of the ears looked like this:

And a VERY FEW looked like this.

The good ears cooked down to be 6 small bags of corn to freeze.

Dan and Gwendolyn planted sunflowers this year.  Because they were planted late, I didn't think they would amount to much, but they all bloomed beautifully and the girls were very excited to see them!

Three weeks ago, we had our first hard frost and since then, everything in the garden has died.  We pulled out all the plants that still had green on them and fed them to the chickens.  

I didn't plant any big red tomatoes this year, but just left up the volunteer plants that came up from last years seed.  We still had more tomatoes than we could use.  I did plant two sun gold tomato plants and we had more than enough of them for salads and snacking.  Lucinda liked to pick the green ones.  

So that is our garden this year! We only got a few cantaloupe and we did pick TONS of bell peppers, but I forgot to get a picture of them.  The kale did well again as usual.  We are having special meetings this week at the church, so though we're busy with those, I've taken it easier on some of my weekly chores.  I finally was able to sit down and make a post on the old blog! This morning we walked to the nursing home and got to see (through the windows) the residents who used to attend our service when we were allowed to have it.  We miss them very much.  
Keep your eyes peeled for another post soon!

Gardening with the Shedd's

I tried quite hard to make a punny topic about Garden Shedd's...but it didn't make sense.  SO I ended up going with a drab title to this post. 

😀

 

 

Well, I hope you all have had an excellent week so far!  I mentioned in my last few posts about our garden and how excited I am about it.  Well, I'll post a few pictures in this post to show you what I mean.  I grew up on a farm and never really got too excited about gardening, weeding, or any of that.  But now that I've been away from it for a few years, I really miss being able to just get outside and plant things, see them grow, and tend to them. 

 

When we were living in Baltimore, I attempted to plant flowers and tomatoes, but a few birds ate my plants so I never tried again the next year.  When we moved to New York and saw the big area in our backyard, we decided this year we would try planting a garden. 

 

Almost everyone up here said that we shouldn't plant directly in the ground, but rather, build raised beds and do it that way.  But I convinced Dan that we needed to try a regular garden first and just see how it goes. 

 

A friend came over and plowed up a plot for us and we spent a few weeks tilling it and raking grass clods from it. 

 

On our anniversary (April 30th), we planted tomatoes, cantaloupe, and watermelon in empty cottage cheese containers and yogurt containers indoors.  They sprouted pretty quickly.  I honestly wasn't counting on them to come up at all since we got a lot of the seeds for 50 cents and 25 cents a packet at the dollar tree.  haha.

 

 

Two weeks ago, I transplanted them into bigger containers.  I figured we may as well go ahead and plant them outside, so we did that last week.  As you can see from the picture, Dan was very excited. 

 

 

 

I felt sort of silly outside, taking pictures of our tiny tiny squash plants and corn plants which have already come up, but hey, I'm a hobby farmer.  What can I say? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So that's the huge news about our amazing garden.  Dan is supposed to build a fence around it soon, to keep the critters out. 

Also, I love walking around the house and seeing all of the beautiful flowers.  The lilacs were blooming two weeks ago, and now it is the rhododendron.    

 

 

Also, our chickens are growing and Dan made a little cage for them so we can move them about in the yard.  Hopefully their pecking around will decrease the tick population. 

 

 

Also, I'm sort of counting my eggs before the chickens have started laying.  I can't wait to gather eggs.  Hopefully they will start laying this month though.

 

In other not-so-interesting news, we discovered this spot about a mile from our house where there are small waterfalls.  We usually do a sunday afternoon walk there each week now.  Of course, we always bring lots of plastic bags for gathering cans.  I was trying to take a panoramic photo here and must have been moving too fast...because Dan looks hilarious. 

 

 

And Gwendolyn is doing well!  She had her first visit with a pediatrician last week.  She hasn't grown much, but she is back to her birth weight.  So that's good. 

 

Dan loves to prop her up against the cushions on the couch and have father-daughter chats with her.  I think they look hilarious.  Especially Gwen though...

 

 

That's about it for now.  Hopefully my next post will be an update on the church and all the remodeling projects we've completed.  Also, I am hosting a ladies brunch this Saturday, so I will try to take some photos of that. 

Until next time!