Gardening

Boy, it’s been a warm one this year. We’ve had off and on mini-heat waves since June. It gets hot and sticky and then nice and cool. I’m not one for the heat, but I make do. Last week, in between the humidity, the temperature dropped to 53 degrees overnight. Laura and I had the […]

I got a good jump on my gardening this year, but was forced to stop because we experienced a brief heat wave earlier this week. The temperature rose up to 90 degrees and there was no way I was going to work outside in that. Early this morning, the heat moved out and the cool […]

Every spring, as I plant my garden, I surprise myself with how wonderful everything looks. I do the weeding from the previous year early on and when I’m finished with that, I plant the seeds. I usually grow tomatoes, kale, chard, beets, and various types of lettuce. After I plant, I sit back and wait. […]

I was outside yesterday picking some yellow squash that was getting rather large, when I noticed the orange tops of a few carrots peeking through the surface of some nearby soil. I decided to grab the greens of those carrots and give a nice tug. Surprisingly, some fully grown carrots appeared in my hand, like […]

This is the first year I planted beets, so I’m thrilled with how nicely they’re growing. I had no idea it was so easy. Really, beets are almost as hands-off as Swiss chard and kale. Take a look at these beauties. The stems and leaves of beets look almost exactly like those of chard. As […]

I think we finally got this gardening thing right. Last year, I planted way too much kale and chard and we couldn’t even come close to eating all of it. I had so much that I was giving it away. Basically, I had one raised bed (8’x4′) with only kale in it and another raised […]

I got this idea yesterday. Since I recently picked up a load of composted horse manure (that has no smell) over at the farm, why not try try to grow some chard indoors again? It’s the middle of October and my chard is still going strong outside, but I’m not sure how long that’s going […]

The entire goal of yesterday’s excursion was to shovel a load of horse manure into my truck and bring it back to the house to dump in our new raised garden beds. While the primary mission was accomplished, our secondary mission of petting and feeding the horses across the street somehow elbowed its way into […]

Well, this year’s gardening season was a complete success. I set up three raised beds and we grew cherry, plum and big boy tomatoes, green beans, chard, kale and lettuce. I, never in my life, thought we could get so much food from three small locations. I believe the first vegetable we began eating was […]

My good buddy, Steve, invited me over to his place this past Friday. He wanted to give me some gigantic chard plants that he grew in his garden this past summer. Since the cold weather is moving in, either the plants die or head inside. He figured that we could dig the plants up and […]