THE GARDEN IS COMING, THE GARDEN IS COMING!

Well, at least the seed catalogs are here.  They've been coming since the end of November, which i find humorous because that's about the time you're really putting the garden to bed (haha, get it? bed?) for the winter and then they have to start tempting you with next year! I am a firm believer in that you have to be gone to be missed, and that's why i need down time from things.  This is why i will always need a change of seasons and could never really live in a totally warm climate.  Warmer would be nice, though......

So i have had the down time now from the garden and took out the pile of seed catalogs i had been collecting for the last couple of months.

This is the pergola Bob built for me because
 I had this brilliant idea that i was gonna hang my
tomato plants upside down to
 save some room in the beds.
Lesson learned: tomatoes don't grow upside down!

 And oh boy!  It was getting me all excited about this year's garden!  Last year we put 8 new raised beds out there because my thought process was to plant enough to have some for farmer's market and enough for us too.

,

The front 10 beds were the ones we put in a couple years ago, the other  8,
including the ones on stilts, we put in this last spring. 

The garden in full bloom in late May. See the tomato plants hangin' upside down?

 I had never tried to sell produce at the market because everyone had it, and when you have just a little bit on your table, no one looks at it.  I did alright selling some produce this year but have decided that this summer the garden will be just for our consumption.  I want to really plant enough to freeze a bunch, now that we finally got the chest freezer, thanks to our friend Justin. He's always finding us free stuff! And i really want to focus more on our sustainability, to live off this land as much as possible. More then we have anyway.

The garden at the end of the season, warn and weathered.

and one lonely squash.

Now i must go through all the seed i had left from last year, plan a garden, make a plan for rotation of the crops, plan for a three sister's garden again the right way (not plant bush beans like i did last year, silly - they are supposed to climb up the corn stalks!), and figure out the best way to get the most out of our limited space. Well, i guess its not really limited, it is pretty big.  But this is all pretty much new to me, Everett did all the planting in the first years here, i just did the harvesting. Last year was the first time i totally took over, knowing very little, but learning a lot! And now that Everett has passed, i really have no one to ask advice from on how to do it all.  I will miss that.