How Does Your Garden Grow?

Since moving to the farm two years ago I have grown to love gardening and especially canning!  You can call me "old fashion" or "southern" (it would be a compliment) but I seriously get such satisfaction and enjoyment out of growing things and canning them.  

I have learned having a beautiful bountiful garden is a lot of work.  It works out nicely that we share the garden with my in laws and between the four of us we manage to keep it watered, weeded, and tended to.  We plant sugar snap peas, potatoes, onions, broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, squash, zucchini, cucumbers, and corn.  This year we are also going to try growing watermelon, green peppers, red peppers, and we even have a volunteer pumpkin vine coming up.  My MIL also planted 3 blueberry bushes and strawberry plants.  

The thought of being self sufficient is very alluring especially with increasing cost of quality food and the increasing difficultly finding food that isn't genetically modified.  We still have a long ways to go before we could say we are self sufficient but between our garden, fresh eggs from the chickens, and beef from our cows we are making progress.  I told Brandon I wanted a dairy cow so we could have raw milk (hence cheese and yogurt) but the thought of milking a cow by hand twice a day, every day and the fact that one cow would produce way more milk than we could ever consume makes that a pretty far fetched idea for now!

Last year was my first "big" year canning.  I canned strawberry preserves, peach preserves, chow chow relish, sweet pickles, dill pickles, pasta sauce, salsa, tomato juice, green beans, and Brandon canned sauerkraut (which was a huge hit).  It was a lot of fun spending the time in the kitchen with my Mom (who taught me the basics of canning).  I found out not only do canned goods make great gifts it is also so nice to walk down to our basement and grab a can of whatever I need.  We also froze strawberries and peaches for homemade ice cream, squash, zucchini, and corn. Our first batch of sauerkraut is in the basement fermenting right now with the hopes that that smelly process will be over before baby #2 arrives.     I am hoping to get just as much canned this year although baby #2 and the tomatoes will probably we ready about the same time ;)

Potatoes and Onions

Cabbage

Planting the tomato plants.

I found instructions for these awesome garden baskets on Pinterest and had Brandon whip me up a few.  They turned out great and are perfect for gathering the goods and rinsing them off before bring them in the house.  Brandon just loves Pinterest ;)