forgive a simple gardening pleasure LOL - modified

[simplynaturalfarm]

This is rather pitiful. My Mom and I used to garden big time. We tried to can enough for our family of 7 for a year and would do hundreds of quarts of salsa, tomatoes, tomato sauce and paste, beans, beets, chutneys, pickles, relishes, ketchup etc - our canning room was always bursting from our acre sized garden. We produced all our own pork, chicken, turkey, beef, milk, cheese etc.
Then I got married and knew full well we'd be living in a trailer park in a city for at least 3 years till DH graduated from vet school and we returned to the farm. It has been two summers and we have never been around to garden the other summers, til this year when DH planned his rotations to be at school during the summer and on preceptorships in the early fall. So, after a 2 year hiatus, I decided to have a little garden. I initially thought the trailer park had a horrible scheme to eliminate all gardening when they said we could flower garden but not veggie garden, but then I found out it was because of a waste spill on the path in our back yard that used to have train tracks on it. So I decided to put things in pots and bags of potting soil and have a greenhouse. I have an 8x8 garden - what a laugh. Honestly, I love it - talk about a breeze to take care of . Due to odd weather and being gone 2 weeks here and there for externships, I have only harvested a few cukes til now. I planted 4 tomatoes, 2 green peppers, 2 jalapenos, one summer squash, 2 cucumbers, one acorn squash and one butternut. I knew I wasn't going to be around to baby beans, beets and other things like that. Yesterday I got around to checking the jungle in the greenhouse and realized there was lots ready. I picked 16 oversized cukes (which I'm making into relishes, chutneys, pickles etc), and 10lbs of tomatoes. I got two 1 lb beefsteaks and the 10lbs of tomatoes are Romas. I threw away another 10lbs of tomatoes that had been nibbled on by mice, slugs and grasshoppers (they are in hoards here and I should have staked or caged all the tomatoes). I got 12 nice big green peppers and have 2 plants that are lying on the ground because of the weight of the green peppers not ready to harvest. I have enough jalapenos to make 3 batches of salsa and enough little ones to eventually pickle for putting in dishes. The cuke plants are loaded with blossoms, and the tomatoes are covered in large green and orange/turning red tomatoes. I have 7 large butternuts and more babies coming, and the acorn squash has little squash all over it.
I put my three pails of produce on my freezer and was so pleased - while I gardened, I've never canned before, as my Mom did the canning and I gardened and helped harvest. Talk about pitiful! LOL But I never imagined a small 8x8 plot could be this rewarding!
Happy gardening
Heather

Here is a picture of some of my pitiful produce (not all there as I still hadn't finished picking)


And now some pictures of the farm and my Mom's garden - she cut back and planted a lot of the garden into grass as the majority of us are not living at home any more. (just Dad and my little sister
This is from the roof of the house in June/early July- My Mom is forever climbing things to take pictures. Her flower beds and garden. I love this picture. (I wish I had her flower green thumb!)

A ground shot of her back flower gardens that open into her veggie garden. Just 3 years ago this was a grass lawn that I told her we should turn into a lovely flower area. She bemoaned the fact that she doesn't know how to grow flowers well and definitely can't arrange her own flower groupings to look nice and almost wild/English garden. So we plotted the size of the garden and while she was on vacation I industriously dug it all up for her (the extent of my help for her flowers!). Then she plotted and planned and I think it is gorgeous, but she is embarassed to show it to people because she doesn't think she knows how to arrange flowers well LOL. I love her trellis on the side that is covered in hop vines! She built it herself out of 4x4's and wooden trellises as she wanted a little haven to put her swing in.



Her tomato patch (she got 600-700lbs of tomatoes off 17 plants last year - I think that's mighty good for a zone 1b 2A!)

[Laurieks]

Just beautiful, if you don't mind me asking what state does she live in? I bet the trees make such a wonderful condition for the garden. Even my husband walked by and stopped and said Wow what a neat garden.

[simplynaturalfarm]

My Mom is in Saskatchewan, Canada right north of North Dakota. (sorry if you know where it is, but lots of people don't ) She lives about 4 hours north of Minot, North Dakota. They have a very short growing season, and nothing frost sensitive is planted before June 1-6 (depending on when the full moon is) and the garden is usually done by the 3rd of September. The nights go down to 40-50F which makes it is hard to ripen a lot of things because it isn't warm around the clock. That and the fact that we usually get a frost in at least 2 of the 3 months of growing season (always around full moon), so the burlap sacks, extra sheets and blankets are always near or else we wouldn't have much of a garden at all. Definitely makes it a challenge to grow things, but it also means we have very few parasites, pest etc. I kept saying if I could only have a zone 3 or 4 I could grow more squash, melons, peppers etc, but we learned to use greenhouse and plastic to extend the season.
This is the farm they are selling - they are moving to an old Sears building on Main Street in town and the lot does not have anything but a building and 3 car gravel parking lot in the back. I imagine she will sorely miss her gardening!!
Heather

[Joann]

Heather, thank you for sharing this beautiful garden story. You and your mother are an inspiration.

Joann

[cutiepie6]

heather
I think I have seen those pics in a magazine before.
I am sure that it is definitely print worthy if your parents haven't tried to query a magazine with a few pics. Wow!
my garden is burned up and sad.
Carrie

[simplynaturalfarm]

Carrie, I was disappointed that we didn't take before and after pictures because so many flower magazines have little contests with before and after.
Thanks Joann and others for the encouragement.
Heather

[Shelley (whistlingtrain)]

Oh, it makes me dream of when I'm old and some young people want to take over my farm! Of course that's probably a good 20 years from now. But every August it gets to me as we approach physical and mental burnout on our farm. In another month, it will be too late for planting much and what will be will be until we start over in the spring. But I have caught myself daydreaming a lot about my future 2 acres of garden (not "farm") with a swing, a handful of chickens, and--my cow!

The gardens are beautiful! Thank you for sharing the pictures.

[simplynaturalfarm]

After having lived in a trailer park, I've begun to realize how much one can do with a little bit of space. A person doesn't need dozens of chickens, an acre of garden, cows galore etc. One could happily live on a couple of acres to sustain themselves with a small cow, a nice little flock of half a dozen hens and a pig to eat your veggie scraps from the intensively planted garden. There is that much less to care for, mow (although I was a keen advocate of sheep for mowing , weed, and I would happily trade a few hours a month off the farm to pay for the animal's feed instead of working 10x the hours to be completely self sufficient - for example, our local organic grain grower said he'd happily give me all the grain I needed for my household and the chickens if I would raise him some meat chickens. I think I could easily barter for hay and other things in the same way - when I advertised for a chicken plucker, I got 6 calls from people asking if I would raise them some chickens and pigs. LOL
Bigger isn't always better, and properly utilizing and layering what you have can be an art form!
Regards to all
Heather

[Lesli]

Beautiful gardens. It is amazing what you can grow in such a short season. One question, what do you do with yourselves during the long horrible winters?? How do you fill your time? My husband would go stark raving mad. He gets cabin fever if he has to stay in a whole weekend!!

[simplynaturalfarm]

Well, I wonder how you guys in the heat handle the cabin fever being forced to stay indoors in air conditioning - at least in SK we can dress up and go outside. I couldn't even run around naked here and be comfortable (temperature wise LOL).
Eventually we realized that if we just sat in the house waiting for milder weather, we'd be there for 7 months . So we don't let it get us too down (we do suffer cabin fever after a few months), and Mom and I still walk every day even if it is -30 or -40C. If it is really windy we might skip a day or two, but we layered (talk about marshmallows out walking LOL), and I even rode the horse when I could handle the cold (not moving makes it colder for horseriding). I had lots of stall cleaning, lots of researching, ordering for spring, reading, winter crafts, reading, catching up on Jane Austen movies, reading (did I mention I'm avid reader and that's when I found I had time to catch up on the latest research and books), and just taking a break from working spring/summer/fall. Sometimes it feels like so much work in our short spring/summer/fall because we have so little time to get things ready - it's winter and then changes to summer overnight and you have 2 weeks to get the garden ready and planted in order to take advantage of every day. There's constant weeding, chores for animals, hauling water, moving cattle for rotational grazing every day, haying, then before you know it it is processing, and you feel like you dont have enough hours in the day to get the garden out before the first September hard freeze comes. You have animals to butcher, gardens and fruits to winterize, equipment to oil and store, and the fall you had hoped to relax and enjoy has turned into cold winter. It made for summers that just flew by.
But here I am in Iowa in 95F wishing it was in the 60's LOL. I am so into cool weather - I would rather find ways of extending the season than deal with this kind of weather for months at a time. And interestingly enough, because I come from an arid climate with only 13 -17 inches of precipitation in a year (most of it in downpours of 4 inches at a time and then only 1/2 inch of rain in the summer LOL), we have learned how to collect and store water for gardening, use gray water for flowers, dig sloughs for summer animal watering etc. So living in a place that gets 37 inches a year, and downpours once a week, I don't understand everybody saying how dry it is, when drought was a way of life for me. I think of the millions of gallons running into ditches that could be collected (and stored for these "dry" times when their creeks go dry). I also think of all you people in drought states and how much you would like this "dry" year with it's inch of rain a week! We had a 3 year drought in SK a while back and that was dry - grasshoppers eating all the hay, having to feed hay in the summer because there isn't anything on the pasture, trying to find hay when every farmer was looking for it and payin $180 per round bale etc. Thankfully we had 60 acres of summer fallow that I could turn the cattle onto and even though the grasshoppers ate the hay, we got a late crop that gave us enough to only need to purchase 3 tons from a friend. I kept the cows off the pastures unless they were ready to be grazed and that spared them from long term damage neighbor's cattle did to their land - eating it down to the ground and then digging and eating up the roots. After one year of that, the grass needs an extra 6 weeks to recover the next spring.
It is very interesting to see how drastically different life styles are in different states.
Heather

[graceinspired]

You don't think you've got your mothers green thumb??? That sounds highly imppresive to me in a tiny 8x8 plot!! I think you've got it, and just need the space to use it properly!

Those pictures are lovely, both of your mom's garden and your harvest.
Christina

[Selden]

We have the same short growing season, or maybe a little worse (zone 3 here, but we're high in the mountains as well). We count on frosts until June 15 and then again by the first week in September. We had a frost warning last night, but it only got down to 38° F. We have a frost warning again for tonight. I have my annuals covered. In mid-August...

Beautiful gardens, Heather!

Your description of the flat-out frenzy of work in the short season rang exactly true to me. One thing we rarely have here, however, is drought. Our climate tends to be a colder version of Seattle. Cold, grey, and wet. Sounds enticing, doesn't it?

[simplynaturalfarm]

You do have a much more challenging climate Selden - we are usually safe to plant June 6th. Mom said it's been feeling a tad "fallish" some days, so I can't wait til next WEdnesday when we are back there. And it is easier to water things than try to deal with too much water - at least it sounds like it woudl be. Do you guys ever have problems with Seasonal depression? Lots of relatives used to live on the Canadian West coat (Vancouver etc) and ended up moving away after being diagnosed with seasonal depression. I know how hard it can be, because when we would visit for a week, it would rain for 6 of those days and be sunny for the other one. Our winters here rarely get a lot of sun (in Iowa), and DH and I often get depressed around January. In ND and Saskatchewan, we might get cold cold, but it is usually a gorgeous blinding sun to keep you from getting depressed.
I picked another 15lbs of tomatoes off the 4 plants and 5 more peppers. 8 squash (which I'll take home to share LOL), and I just finished canning 9 pints of curried pickles, 9 pints of bread and butter pickles, and 12 pints of salsa. As we are supposed to be travelling to ND on Monday, I'd better get making more salsa with those tomatoes! I had no idea tomato plants could produce that well. And I'm still throwing cracked or mouse nibbled tomatoes away. I'm sad at the thought of leaving my plants still covered in turning tomatoes, plus my cucumber is covered in miniature cukes. Oh well, I'll have to offer it to the neighbors, as we'll be gone for the next 6 weeks.
Heather