Well It's Been A Year....

So a lot has happened that will never make it to this blog. Last year's tomato harvest was incredible, we made lots of sauce with our own garlic and basil and froze most of it in glass jars. Lesson learned don't try to defrost anything in glass in hot water- it will break and ruin all that hard work. We planted nearly twice as much garlic last fall and all of it seems to be doing great. Lindsay has cut at least 70 garlic scapes off and we'll be digging the bulbs up at the end of the month. I should back track a little. Lindsay's mom bought us a mini-greenhouse for our backyard. We put it up in early January, over where our coldframe used to be, and actually revived the spinach that was planted last November. That spinach is still growing in that greenhouse today, although it has bolted from the heat we were still able to get many many meals out of it. I haven't utilized as much space as I could have on the cement ground part of the greenhouse- I had planned on putting up shelves to grow things in pots and what not. The in ground space has been filled though, right now it houses the spinach, some pepper plants, two eggplant plants, squash hills that just sprouted, basil, and two monstrous volunteer tomato plants. I threw all of the spent dirt from the pots I used last year onto the ground of the greenhouse and it must have contained some dormant tomato seeds of an unknown variety which now happen to be my healthiest tomato plants. This was the first year I experimented with starting seeds indoors. It was the only thing that made sense considering the hundreds of seed packets I came into last year. With just a simple setup of shop lights and fluorescent bulbs I was able to successfully start about fifty lettuce/kale/broccoli/cabbage plants which got set out in early April, followed by many many tomato plants which have mostly found homes in the many gardens. I also started eggplant, pepper,basil, ground cherry, etc. I ordered seed potatoes, all blue and storage varieties, which may or may not give us some tubers to slice up this year. The amount of work that I could be doing at all the garden plots is overwhelming. It makes me want to quit my job and only grow food. Screw going back to college- I want to concentrate my efforts on learning to be totally self sustainable so maybe someday I can separate myself a little from the grid and the grind too. Today I made my own hot sauce and we went to the Stratford Ecological Center and witnessed a mama goat in labor. We got to see the baby right after it was born! Sorry about the hiatus from the blog- the pictures will show a lot, and I'll remember more for future, hopefully more frequent entries.

Starting the plants indoors is the easy part.

Our strawberry patch has spread and the berries are delicious.