Five Goals We’ve Set for Our 2016 Summer Garden
1. Grow and eat the best tomatoes and cucumbers that we have ever eaten in our lives.
Everyone knows that a farm grown tomato is the best tomato and those supermarket tomatoes can’t even tomato. Tomato. Oh my stars, do I want a real tomato!
And the white cucumbers we grew a few years back from Baker Creek Seed Company tasted out of this world delicious, especially when we didn’t let them get too big. I definitely intend to gobble them up while they’re still small!
Now I’m craving a tomato + cucumber salad.
2. Build a stand-alone goat hut in the pasture.
This one is more a chore for my husband. We currently have the goats in a huge plastic thing that used to be a vat of cooking oil or something. There’s a door cut in it, and it’s sitting under a covered lean-to, which is part of the shed. It’s very possible the new pigs have taken this over. Or the flies have booted them all out (we have GOT to do something about them!)
We saw some little goat houses on campus at Tuskegee University in March that Rocky thought he could duplicate here on our farm. They just look like someone took a wide sheet of metal and made an arch, then secured the ends in the dirt. It would definitely get a lot more air-flow, which, personally, I believe those little stinkers need.
3. Preserve the harvest by freezing, canning and drying (no waste).
I’ve got more research to do. We did harvest and can some tomatoes & pickles in our first garden together a few years ago, so we are familiar with blanching and water baths. We upgraded Rocky to a pressure canner a couple of fathers’ days ago, but last year was a total bust with a newborn and the move to the farm.
4. Start some fall/winter crops
With the summer crops in the ground, and the late ones going in by next weekend, we want to make sure to look forward a few months, so we can be prepared. (Can you tell I’m a planner? Yeah.)
I’ve never planted any Fall or Winter crops, so I’m really excited to try this out. I really want to plant my own pepper (the kind you grind over a finished meal) or asparagus, which both take multiple years to mature into anything that can be harvested. Maybe I never felt that much commitment to any one gardening space.
5. Research how to build greenhouses.
We are just in the dreaming stage for this, as we are digging ourselves out of a lot of debt. But if we can create a greenhouse inexpensively, and if I have demonstrated some proficiency in producing vegetables in our garden, then this may be a way to extend our growing season and produce more food, which would end up saving us money.
So I’ll be looking at construction and maintenance cost versus potential savings on this. My preference is to have the entire fall and winter for construction without haste, so that I could potentially start with early spring plantings. Pretty sure you haven’t heard the last of me and my dream greenhouse.
