2023 Garden
Garden Intro
I recently passed the 400 subscriber mark, thanks to The Good Citizen, Tereza Coraggio and Dr Paul Elias Alexander, all of whom have highlighted my posts. So much gratitude! For new subscribers, Welcome! In case you are not aware, I am building a big garden and an orchard I will be documenting in detail here. This is the garden site.
A Crucible
Crucible: 1: a pot in which metals or other substances are heated to a very high temperature or melted 2 formal + literary : a difficult test or challenge 3 formal + literary : a place or situation that forces people to change or make difficult decisions. -
A Crucible II
(Note to patient readers, post is too long for email but only because of pictures.) I last posted a week and a half ago. I have been busy, and things are about to get busier. It snowed the day I last posted, April 20. I covered this potato bed with partially finished compost.
A Crucible III
(Post too long for email.) The landowner, L, of the farm where I am gardening walked by as I worked on the fence, stopped and said “you know, that is a smart way to garden, leaving the grass around the beds instead of plowing up the whole thing to black dirt.” I said thank you, and told her, “I’ve long thought a garden should be as much a sanctuary as a …
A Crucible IV
(Post too long for email) Happy Memorial Day. This crucible is coming to an end soon. A few highlights of late. Tomatoes and peppers…
A Crucible V
[post too long for email] It has been an extraordinary spring. Or rather, here in Minnesota, we went from winter to summer, with about a four day interval of spring-like weather in between. It has been hot (80’s+) and dry the last three weeks. It rained lightly maybe twice in May. There is no rain in the forecast, the weather more typical of late July/ea…
Garden Update
[post too long for email, mostly pics with some commentary] Raised beds need a haircut. The hay becomes mulch for around garden beds. This is the best lettuce I have ever grown.
Atypical Harvest
[Post too long for email, mostly pics] Returning from the Boundary Waters, the above picture was the second harvest. That plastic container is a 4gallon fresh water container I cut the top off of and use as a wash basin for dishes and clothes on my camping trips. It is full mostly with beets. I processed the basil with olive oil for pesto. The onions I h…
Garden Update
Sunflowers! The garden is full of sunflowers, all of them volunteers. Peppers on the left, artichoke in the grass immediately behind, beans, then onions, carrots and tomatoes. [post too long for email, mostly pics] I roasted three artichoke, according to a recipe I found online. They were underwhelming. The artichoke fruited well, the heart was tasty, b…
Early Fall Garden Pictures
Welcome again to the garden. It is harvest time, in earnest. This was the largest of many harvests of tomatoes. Five different kinds of regular tomatoes: early treat hybrid, big beef hybrid, brandywine pink, cherokee purple, roma, Burpee’s long keeper. Three different kinds of cherry tomatoes: citrine, sunrise bumblebee, chadwick. Aug 30.
Gardening Interlude
[post too long for email, mostly pics] Quite a few new subscribers since I last posted a garden update. Welcome to my garden. It is my first year gardening here. It was a sheet of turf grass. It has gone just about as well as I imagined, if not quite. It has been harvest time in earnest for a month, though there is a slight pause in that of late, while I…
Final 2023 Garden Harvest
[Post too long for email, mostly pics] The final harvest was a long, drawn out process that also involved prepping beds for next year, a process I have been involved in for the past month. But the past three days have been the bulk harvest. This was the first round of the bulk potato harvest, Burbank Russet and Genesee. The buckets came from the Minneapo…