Gardening and cooking are just a few of my passions in life. My hands love the dirt and my soul loves the anticipating adventure.
I grow my vegetables in a 6-foot wide x 12-foot long x 2-inch thick box of pretreated Douglas fir with cedar corner posts 6-inch x 6-inch square routed 2-inches to hold the boards. I use carriage bolts with washers and wing nuts with washers to attach after drilling the correct diameter holes. Girls can do anything, and I had no help from my male neighbors.
A day later, I called the garden center and had 3.3-cubic yards of topsoil put in at an expensive price even after putting regular dirt in the bottom 10-inches deep. It is not necessary to put the corners in concrete and you put nothing in the bottom of the box.
Niagara grapes twist and coil along the house on coated wires and they produce lots of fruit for homemade jelly and juice. A robin delighted me by building a nest in the grape vines one year.
Peach trees grow to the right side and produce an abundance of Elberta peaches that I can in Ball® jars for winter delights.
You can no longer buy the flavorful peaches in the grocery stores, yet farmer’s markets will have them for the best tasting peaches right off the tree and not picked green!
I planted my five trees from peach seeds in a hole 3-inches deep and they came up that year or the next spring. It takes 3-years for the tree to produce pink blossoms. Teach your youngsters to always plant the seeds pointed side up 5-feet apart.
The veggie box is worth its cost! I affectionately plant and eat fresh lettuce; spinach; kale; Swiss chard; tomatoes; cabbage; carrots; beets; snow peas; and okra plus more all summer. I plant my squash at the corners of the box and let the vines drop onto the grass. I only plant one of each at corners: the zucchini and crooked yellow neck are perfect.
Being single, I don’t need entire rows of anything and the seeds can be planted closer than in a garden dug into the earth. You don’t even need to make rows.
There are no weeds to pull; watering is easy to do with a hose in early morning or late evening or enjoy nature’s free rain. The wood is not to be painted or sealed; it becomes a nice weathered look to last forever. There is no bending, so no back pain and the center can be reached without a problem because the center is only 3-feet from the long end boards.
The onion sets I plant I love in salads known as ‘green onions’ then let most of them turn to big bulbs for autumn to pull up and let air dry on my garage floor removing the tops first.
Bell peppers turn red if you leave them on the bush, so don’t buy red bell pepper plants that are costlier, since they too are green turning red!
The tomato in the picture is 1.5-pounds and is an heirloom, pink Brandy wine, pure strain not hybridized from Germany in 1864. It is used as one of the parents for hybridized tomatoes today.
Enjoy your fresh garden vegetables, berry bushes, fruit trees and cook up culinary delights everyone will envy. What you don’t eat fresh you can freeze or can and give away.
Plant your garden in large pots, a garden box, or dig up the soil in your backyard. Teach your kids and they will learn about the first sprouts with cotyledons, the false leaves that fall off to send up the true leaves.
Did you know that grocery stores did not exist until about 1946? All food was grown in gardens, found in the woods and meadows, and no one starved.
Visit this website often for informative articles, new cookware products, a few recipes from me, and great ideas!
The soul has no secret that the behavior does not reveal. ~Lao Tzu
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. ~Cicero