Garden Abundance

Purple Hull Peas

Potatoes . . . we've dug a few thousand pounds (seventeen rows) so far.
Fourteen more rows to dig. . . oh my! Storage will be interesting. . .

The girls braided onions most of the afternoon on Saturday.
Where to put all of them is now the question.

One can only eat and preserve so many cucumbers!

And cabbage . . . it shall be forever immortalized upon our minds.
After chopping over a thousand heads of it on the kitchen table,
and having buckets and jars of saurkraut fermenting in every corner and building,
and lugging big white burlap sacks of it to give away everywhere we go,
how could we ever forget?

Gardening All Day, Every Day... Not Quite!

Steve weeding onions.

The lovely potato patch... until you look a little closer
and see all of the little orange potato bugs!
We are frantically looking for organic ways to control
potato bugs before the whole patch is eaten alive!

Joanna - putting clods of dirt on the cardboard mulch to hold it in place.

Purple cabbage mulched with Chiquita banana boxes!

The far end of the garden - mostly sweet potatoes, melons, and corn.

Anyone want to come apprentice?? :)

Happiness!

Last week it was a gorgeous spring day.

I had determined to work fast and furiously down my to-do list for the day and NOT get distracted with all the wonderful silly little things that leave me frusterated and behind at the end of the day. Before I settled in to answer a ton of overdue emails, though, I was going to clean the living room. Fast. Really quick. It could be done in 10 minutes if I didn't get distracted or answer the phone or anything. Mom and Steve and the girls were out in the garden planting strawberries.

Ready, set, go! I started on the living room. Plumping sofa pillows, re-stacking and putting away the books stacked haphazardly on the rocker.... Legos under the chair that our dear little charges for the day had forgotten when Mom took them to the garden.... Mom's precious cabbage seedlings that they must have bumped over when they ran through earlier....

Suddenly the door burst open. Devin (3) came charging in breathlessly. "Come!" he panted, pulling at my skirt. "Come ou'side wif me! Come!" His voice was urgent, almost as though a rainbow was fading and there would be no time if I didn't hurry.

I could pretend I didn't understand his gibberish, tell him I was busy cleaning... that I couldn't come, couldn't stop. Or tell him to go show my sisters who were already outside with him. But one look at his sparkling brown eyes, the eager expectation of the joy he was about to share with me... How could I not grab his hand and run out the door, eager to see what he wanted to share with me?

I dropped the broom and raced after him. There was no time to ask what it was that I had to see. He was already charging across the yard towards the garden by the time I was coming out the front door. As he glanced back to make sure I was following, the look of sheer joy and happiness on his face was enough to melt my heart.
What on earth? I wondered. What is this treasure that I must see now... this once in a lifetime opportunity?

And then Devin stopped.
Right in front of the trailer backed up to the garden, heaped with topsoil.
I waited expectantly, smiling, nodding... Yes?

He wiped his dirty hands across his little orange shirt, and then threw them up high over his head, sweeping in the panorama. "Dirt!" he cried with a look of utter delight. "Dirt!" he laughed and giggled and grinned at me. "Dirt! Dirt for me and for you... and for evwybody!"

I smiled, then I laughed. This was the surprise.
This is what was so exciting when I was speed-cleaning the living room.

Devin grinned at me. Then he climbed up on the heap of dirt on the trailer and burrowed his hands deeply into the rich, crumbly mass. He giggled again. "Dirt! I garden. I help! I dig dirt!"
And with that he began scooping up the dirt with his hands and filling one of the buckets.

I grinned back at him and touseled his hair. Then I went and found him a little shovel so he could really dig the dirt. He grinned like I had handed him a million dollars and squealed, "Thank you! Now I scoop big dirt!"

I went back into the house... to my busy world of being behind with everything.... or so it seems at times. There were deadlines and studying and project completion dates to stress about. But did it really matter?

We own dirt! Lots of it! Happiness!

I'm trying to keep the Devin perspective. When I think about what I have, I can't help but have a grin like him. :)

If only we were vegetarian...

Seriously, if we were vegetarians, we'd probably think that we were in Paradise! The amount of produce to harvest, to process, to EAT is astounding! We feel overwhelmed with work, but we know that we are blessed! And we're gladly trading help with harvesting and processing for a share in the bounty! Anybody want to spend a day digging carrots? Or winnowing wheat?

There are always new ways to do things at our house.
Above: Liz and Julia (a neighbor girl) picking peaches from 'Zaiah's backhoe scoop!

The beginnings of peach preserves

Our onions usually do well. So we planted a lot.
Well, this year they did better than usual, so we have onions drying in long, long rows
in one of the neighbor's 250 ft. long barns!
And when we get bored, we sit around and make onion braids...

We've discovered a solution to part of our produce "problem" - a local Amish produce auction where they sell your produce to grocers, etc for a small commission. We also find it a good way to acquire some of the items that we didn't plant this year (like zucchini!). We took half a car load of produce to get rid of and came back with a car stuffed from floor to ceiling, plus an extra $100 to boot! Who can resist a case of 25 organic eggplants for $3.00? Or 50 organic bell peppers for $4.00? (Now that our 600 bell pepper plants are producing, I know better than to think we'd ever need to buy another pepper!!)

... And then there's watermelon. For as long as I can remember, watermelon was a special summer treat we had a few times a year. This year, the Anchor boys' home that my brothers work for decided that they would plant a field of watermelon for the boys to work in! That results in 'Zaiah's red truck pulling up each week with 300 watermelons on it. After unloading them in a huge pile in the basement, he smiles as he drives away saying, "Well, I hope that you can figure out where to sell them this week... I'll bring another load next week!" So we sell watermelons to grocery stores, and neighbors, and at the auction, and... then when nobody else wants to buy them and another load is about to arrive, we all have generous pieces!

(Above: When Sam's friend, Ben came to stay for a week and help us in the garden, they decided that they would each try to eat a whole 25 pound watermelon a day! They came close to reaching their goals. Needless to say, for once, they didn't need much lunch!)

Gardening Big Time, Part II

Joanna (12)

Lotsa weeds to pull!

Ruth (15)

Noah (17) - mulching cabbage

Sam (14) fixing the tiller

Gardening - Big Time!

Broccoli and tomatoes

Abe (19)

Mom, Liz, and Mary weeding the lettuce patch

Abe and Sam love any excuse to use the tractor instead of a hoe!

Squishing one's toes in the mud is so... therapeutic!

We spent the morning in the garden.
It was muddy and wet, but that meant that weeds popped out almost effortlessly.
If only the rows weren't quite so long, we might stay on top of everything.
This year, our garden covers three acres... and it's, well, a challenge to try to keep up!
I'm trying not to think of August and 500 bushels of tomatoes to deal with.
Or 2000 heads of broccoli to freeze and sell.
Or digging all of those carrots and sweet potatoes.
Right now, we're making about 8 gallons of milk into cheese most days.
I guess we need to start an organic restaurant or produce market...

Maybe by the end of summer, we'll all be tanned, toned, and super healthy!

If nothing else, we'll appreciate the food on the table more than ever.
And maybe we'll never again view weeding a small plot as something hard to do.