Garden Musings
In seed time learn,
in harvest teach,
in winter enjoy.
~William Blake~
I'm excited.
While we've always had a garden since moving into our home seven years ago, it is just now that I am getting my mind wrapped around what a gift it is.
Currently, we have a stash of tomatoes, squash and zucchini, green beans, basil pesto and sage pesto stored in our freezer. We haven't kept a log of our produce, but I'd estimate this year was our most productive considering what I have in our freezer and what we consumed outright from the garden - from ground to table.
We are also still consuming lettuce from our Fall Lettuce Bed. Those delicate leaves even survived two rounds of frost! Here is a photo of the lettuce bed this afternoon and we had a frost this very morning.
(as you can see I haven't taken the time to weed!)
My husband has already dug another large garden bed for next Spring, and although not finished, it has great potential. I also have the vision for an additional garden bed, we'll just see if we add that for 2011 or wait until 2012.
Gardening enables us to stretch our dollars. We focus on growing what seems to grow well and what we consume in large quantities. Throughout the cold weather months I am most apt to have a stew or soup cooking in the crock pot and more often than not I add tomatoes, even green beans. These are items that now I have in my freezer and don't have to add to the grocery list. The bonus, of course, is that I know where they came from and they taste so good!
One of my projects for this Winter is to sketch our 2011 Garden. In the past I have simply listed out what vegetable and flower seeds we need to order, and there you go! This year I'd like to give it a bit more thought and time to see how we can use our space that much more effectively...maybe even plant those carrots my daughter keeps mentioning!
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