Garden Tour Video – June 2016
Here is Sarah’s video tour of our garden for this year.
Making Homemade Pesto
This is how I know it’s officially summer! Cleaning gallons of fresh basil. We have 5 types of basil growing in the garden this year: Napolitano, Genovese, Lettuce Leaf, Lemon, and Holy Basil. We use all but the Lemon and Holy (they are more for teas) in our pesto. Picking the leaves off the stems,
Grape Arbor
We’ve completed a grape trellis and added 3 new grape vines to the garden. This area is a fairly steep slope so we couldn’t put raised beds on it. We are trying to utilize the space with grapes instead…I think it will work, but time will tell. The trellis was easy to build using red
Garden Season Number 3
We are planting out this year’s garden as fast as we can. It is so nice to have the garden fence all done so we can keep the animals out…especially the chickens. We are up to about 15 raised beds, with quite a few additional small and large containers. Within the fenced in garden we
DIY Chipping Attachment for Garbage Can
Since we live in the woods, we knew that we would be clearing some areas for buildings, gardens, etc. We bought a Stanley CH7 chipper/shredder last year and have been giving it a workout. To make use of the chips, we needed a good way to catch them since they tend to blow all over
55 Gallon Barrels For Small Raised Beds or Planters
We can buy 55 gallon plastic barrels for $5 from our local recycling center. We are going to fill them with dirt and plant some of the harder to contain herbs in them. We decided to cut some of the barrels in half horizontally and others vertically. For the vertically cut barrels we lay them
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Hugelkultur Garden Beds
We used some of our excess logs that we didn’t want to burn in the wood stove for hugelkultur garden beds. Below are some pictures with descriptions of how we built them.You can read more about hugelkultur from richsoil.com, here. The main advantage to hugelkultur is that as the wood rots it will hold water
Dehydrating Meals for Summer 2016 Hiking
Sarah and both her sons ( Ben and Sam) are planning to hike a section of the Appalachian Trail together this summer. We are starting meal preparation with the food dehydrator.We store single servings of each meal using a Food Saver Vacuum Sealer. I will ship them meals to post offices or hostel/hotel locations along
Winter Turnip Harvest
Our turnips were damaged a little bit by temperatures in the teens, but they had bounced back before Sarah recently pulled them all. We like to bake them for an hour at 350 degrees in a greased Pyrex dish with carrots, onion, parsnips, potatoes and any other root crop for an amazing supper. Sarah sometimes
Fencing in the Garden
We let all of our chickens free range, which has caused some trouble in the garden. We quickly added netting around each raised bed, but it was clear that we needed to fence in the entire garden area. We’ve also had racoons, armadillos and other critters in the garden. It took a while, and I