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?? :)

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.