Saturday, February 22, 2014

Survival Saturday

We are buried deep in snow but its still time to turn thoughts to planning and planting your garden.

This year, I am doubling the size of our garden.  I should have enough carrots, peppers, onions, and green beans to make it throw the year after canning and freezing are done.  I hope to have enough tomatoes to make spaghetti sauce for the year and also make enough chili to last through the cold months.  I just finished up the chili and spaghetti sauce from last year.  

I'm adding more beds for beets.....hubby wants pickled beets.  Yuck, but I will do it for him.  I'm also adding broccoli this year.  Potatoes didn't do well last year but it was so wet and cool that I'm surprised I got anything at all.  Hopefully they will do better this year.  

Last year, I used the previous owners vegetable garden area to plant the cucumbers and pumpkins.  I don't know if it was because the ground was so bad or the weather, but they didn't produce hardly anything.  Six cucumber plants and I got eight pints of pickles.  This year, I'm adding a raised bed for the cucumbers, pumpkins, and cantalope.  I was able to get 14 cantalopes last year off of two plants in the raised bed.  They were delicious and I was literally giving them away after a while.  We couldn't keep up with them.

I ordered another blueberry bush and 25 more strawberry plants.  I also will be getting three peach trees and two pear trees.  I hope to add some more berry plants this year, possibly cranberries and currants/  We'll see how it goes.  Next year, I hope to add dwarf apple trees.  I'm looking forward to getting more apples.  I will be looking for organic solutions for our apple trees that are already on the property.  We lost a lot of apples last year due to bugs.  I also need to really getting into pruning.  The trees have never been pruned and the fruit is really small.  

This year I'm also planning on buying a wheat grinder and start making our own bread.  It will hopefully be sometime this summer.  I've very excited about that.  

Have a wonderful weekend!


1 comment :

  1. Hi Michelle, Thanks so much for visiting my blog and welcome to our fair state!!! I wish you all the best with your garden this year. With all the snow we are having, it looks like you have some time until planting. :) We currently have 26" on the ground and the snowbanks are over my head. We have 3 apple trees, but my beloved accidently backed into our most mature one the other day while plowing and it just snapped in two. (sigh) We will be planting more this spring. We also have a couple plum trees and do wonderfully. They taste just like in the store, only better because they are organic. Hope to get to know you better this year. ~Blessings to you and yours!

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