Fall and Winter Garden Update!

Garden In Fall

This asparagus is jammin'!

By far, my biggest success of the year in the garden has been my asparagus beds! These were planted this spring and have been acting like they have been here forever! Asparagus is a perennial so that is a really great beginning! To plant 300 crowns and have this healthy of a start means I will HAVE to market some to my chef friends come spring!

We planted a late summer seeding of bush beans and they are producing plenty of green beans for us to feast on. They have been a great side dish for many of our dinners. My kids love them with lots of garlic! If we can stop eating them long enough to get a few jars of fermented dilly beans made we will be eating on them all winter!

The okra was planted very late as well but as you can see that is not stopping them from popping out fruit left and right! Next year I want to plant much earlier and at least twice as much so I can put up some pickled okra. We are eating it fresh now but might cut some medallions and freeze for future fried okra.

I'm starting to notice a pattern here, our late planting of sweet potatoes are vining all over! Although it appears something has eaten holes all over the leaves, the root is where we want all the energy to be anyway so I'm not too worried. I didn't see any active pest so I think whatever did it has moved on now and they are still growing fast!

This is just one branch of the huge pepper plant that must have 100 fruit growing on it now! They are a lemon pepper with a bright yellow color when ripe. The heat in this little pepper is quite intense but the flavor is like nothing else. It is sweet and citrusy under all the heat, adding a nice flavor profile to just about anything!

Probably my second best accomplishment in this years garden would have to be the ginger. It has grown so much and spread its sweet and spicy roots all through where I planted filling in all the gaps. My little helpers in the background are fighting over who gets to water in all the new plants we just seeded for our fall/winter garden.

Winter Sowing

Miss Duck comes to investigate what all the commotion is about as we sow our winter seeds and water them in real good with some help from my two little boys. Gardening is definitely a family affair on this homestead. Even the animals want to help, she is our supervisor.

So, in these two and a half beds we prepared, we are planting a variety of root and leaf crops. I planted cosmic red carrots, radish, mixed beets (heavy on the Golden Beets, my favorite), swiss chard, lettuce mix, turnips, rutabagas, kale, collards, onions, and some orange carrots at the back. I hope everything germinates and does well because this will feed us all winter if I use frost fabric to cover during our below freezing periods.

After only two days I discovered a fun surprise when I was watering it in again! The kale and radish had already begun germinating! It is so fun to see new life coming up out of the soil and knowing it will sustain our life through the winter months.