Brought to you by: @Kraytive
The time has come for us to clear out our garden beds and prep the planters for Winter. Last Winter, we were still newbies in the gardening world and didn’t even attempt to grow a Fall/Winter crop. Honestly, our first year was so rough (I planted way too late, way too crowded, didn’t do enough research on my crops, a whole recipe for disaster!) that we were too down-in-the-dumps to even think about the success of a Winter crop. This year, though, we are ready for redemption.
Over the weekend, we cleared one planter and half of another. We harvested cucumbers, corn, a LOT of zucchini, pumpkins, potatoes, chamomile, jalapenos, and tomatoes. We should get to the rest of the garden boxes throughout the week as time permits. The rains have come and the tomatoes are starting to split from the amount of extra water, so we are trying to bring in one last tomato harvest before we pull those plants out. We still have jalapenos, herbs, a couple of straggler pumpkins, and beautiful dahlia blooms to harvest, as well as some perennials (blueberries, currants, huckleberries, strawberries, and hardy kiwi) that we will be relocating out of the planter boxes.
After we cleared an entire box, we sifted the soil and added compost to boost the nutrients for the incoming Winter crop. We planted some seeds indoors, and some straight into the first planter.
For the planning process, typically I will make all of the plans and then show Tanner once I have all of the details straight (he’s a man that likes a plan!), but this time, for the FIRST time, we did the planning process together... Don’t worry, everyone survived. We decided to ditch my usual pencil and paper method and went fancy, pulling out our computer and making a grid of our boxes in an excel document. We researched companion planting for the Winter crops we wanted, and put the crops into order by planter box placement. Why I never thought of doing this process on a computer before, I’ll never know. Here’s what we planned out for our boxes:
Our little guy helped us out in the garden as well... He likes to dig the dirt out of the planters and throw it on the floor!
Here are the seeds we started indoors, because for us they have been more successful as transplants into the garden:
Here are the seeds that we will be sowing directly into the soil within the next few weeks:
Here are plants that are already in our planters that we will be transplanting elsewhere in our garden/yard/anywhere besides our planter boxes:
So far, we have only really started planting seeds in one planter. We cleared it, added compost, and planted four (4) rows of onions (Walla Walla, Early Yellow Globe, Evergreen Bunching, and Red Burgundy) and one (1) row of Bull’s Blood Beets. We planted a lot more onions and beets than we typically eat, so we are hoping to pickle and can a lot of them when they are ready to harvest.
Once our broccoli seedlings get big enough, we will transplant them into three (3) rows in this same planter as a companion plant for the beets and onions. We eat a lot of broccoli, so I am hoping that we will have a plentiful harvest of it at the beginning of Winter this year. Our broccoli and mustard seedlings germinated incredibly fast this year and the first little broccolis started poking up from the starter soil only five days after planting the seeds! They are looking pretty leggy, so I’ll try to look up ways to combat that so the stems can grow a bit stronger.
Here are some photos of our most recent harvest, where we had plentiful tomatoes, jalapenos, pumpkins, corn, potatoes, carrots, and sunflowers. We had a little squirrel problem so we pulled the corn a bit earlier than we should have, but we didn’t want to share with the squirrels anymore. We grilled the corn for dinner (so sweet and delicious!) and used the tomatoes and jalapenos to can a salsa, which I’ll write about soon! The pumpkins are being proudly displayed on our front porch to welcome the Fall season until we carve them or eat them. I was amazed with our harvest!
Thanks for tuning in, don’t forget to leave a comment and let me know what your favorite garden crops are to grow in your homestead!
Have a kraytive day!
~
