As the Garden Grows........ May 5th 2014

Welcome back to another installment of "As the Garden Grows" as we share the evolution of a new garden. It has been a VERY wet spring here in north Florida thankfully our raised beds have kept us growing and healthy through many inches of rain :)

I can attest to raised beds making a garden much more manageable when life is crazy busy. Having been in nursing school since this garden was started (I just graduated last Friday) there really hasn't been much time put into maintaining the garden.

We are almost finished with mulching the paths between the beds in the main garden. We were blessed with a truck load of chipped material from a local tree service absolutely free. This allowed to mulching project to move quickly. We put down scavenged cardboard as a weed block before the wood mulch went down.

The garden is in the process of transition from winter crops to spring/summer crops. The last of the english peas were harvested and pulled yesterday. I am going to miss them, they added much to many winter meals. Along with the peas we also pulled the last of the Kohlrabi and started harvesting onions and shallots. I am very proud of the shallots in particular. I started with shallots a little over a year ago with one 4 inch pot of them purchased from Otoole's Organic Herb Farm. I planted in the garden the first year and they multiplied into more than I every could have imagined.  After using them all last year I planted the last few in the new garden this winter. I just harvested them yesterday and once again they had far exceeded expectations in their multiplication. Here they are drying. Once they dry a bit I will trim the roots off and braid the shallots then hang them in our kitchen to supply us all summer and have some left to start next years planting.

Here are the first onions pulled.

We are playing in our deep beds to see how much we can layer in and train vertical to finesse the most out of the square footage.

Both strawberry beds are doing nicely.  The first are traditional and the second are European strawberries.

Here are photos from today of the vegetable and herb beds as well as bees and some lovely peaches.

The following are our kitchen and healing herb beds.

This lovely rosemary started as a four inch pot just a few months ago and has been trimmed several times.

Our hard working bees. Two hives became four this spring. We just harvested 45 pounds of honey from the first two last week.

We are very excited to have peaches on one of our young trees.

The first onions of the year are drying and the tops are getting ready to come out of the dehydrator and be ground into green onion powder.  As soon as they are out cutting celery goes in next then basil, parsley, oregano, dill, and sage. Can you tell I am way behind on dehydrating?

There are still more beets and carrots ready to harvest and replace with more summer veggies. I love this time of year.

What is happening in your garden?