MAY HARVEST

May has been such a wonderful month. The garden is starting to produce. Today we ate fresh spinach (from thinning the rows) and green onions that we grew ourselves...local and organic. It doesn't get any better than this. The spinach made it's way into green smoothies and a little salad. The green onions were salad fixings, and in soup and on top of baked potatos.
We have just found a local organic farm very near our place that sells produce, chicken, and eggs. I'm looking forward to going there for a visit to see what they are all about. On my bookshelf for the past two weeks, I've read the Ominvore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Both great reads with lots of ideas and opinions about the industrial food system.

CHIVES

We picked and dehydrated all the chives that were ready this week. I tried to dry them two different ways. First, in whole sprigs...just put into the dehydrator, and let it do it's work. Then, I decided to try cutting the chives into small bits, and place them onto some parchment paper (with holes poked thru it) one one rack of the dehydrator. This is the way I will do all the remaining chives. They dried quicker, and more evenly than leaving them whole.  I started this process indoors, but the onion aroma quickly changed my mind, and I moved the dehydrator outside.

 

When everything was dried, I put the chives into my small food processor, with just a sprinkle of coarse sea salt, and pulsed it into coarse "powder".  I'll be using this in egg dishes, mixed into sour cream, mashed potatos, meats, or anywhere I want a light onion flavor. We ended up with the two small jars in the last photo. I plan on using the dehydrator a lot more this summer. Upcoming uses will be for dill, oregano, thyme, basil, strawberries, carrot slices, and more.

IN THE GARDEN

The seeds we planted right into the garden are all showing signs of growth. Prairie Boy has 3 rows of radish seedlings, and is eagerly waiting for his corn and peas to poke thru the soil. Prairie girl is faithfully watering her lettuce, garlic, green onions, carrot and cilantro (that comes up as a volunteer crop every year). She also has a variety of bean seeds that have been put in around the strawberry plants. We added 16 ever-bearing strawberry plants this week too. The early spring means that they are already in flower. I hope we get berries from them this year. Today we also dug in plants that came from my parent's farm; horseradish root, and rhubarb. I have never had any luck with rhubarb (we've tried growing it 2 other times), so here's hoping try #3 is the charm.

My part of the garden has the marjoram that survived the winter, spinach that will need to be thinned, beets, celery that I bought from a greenhouse and parsley. PrairieDad is still waiting to transplant peppers and tomatos in his garden spot.  While out purchasing the celery plants, I also picked up 4 thyme, one sage, and two oregano plants. They are now planted among our flowers. We still want to plant kale, rainbow chard, rosemary, multi-colour carrots and try growing leeks.

The garden, and the seed starting workshop have been great learning experiences for us. We've learned the parts of a seed, what a seed needs to germinate, that the first 2 leaves from a seed are not really leaves, but a cotyledon, garden planning, and all about tending the garden.

Spinach, sown April 16, 2012, photo taken May 12, 2012

Viola flowers picked from our lawn..eaten in a salad for Mother's Day. (we have never used any kind of chemical on our lawn, nor do any of our neighbors.)

Most of these things were familiar to us already, but to do this as a family has added a level of newness and excitement that is absolutely enjoyable. Both kids have taken a real ownership of their garden plots. I am really looking forward to seeing the garden produce for us to harvest and eat. Hopefully we can thin out the beets and spinach and add those little greens to a soup or salad later this week.
HARVEST NOTES: The chives have been split into 3 plants now. We have harvested the equivalent of 4 packages of grocery store chives. Tomorrow I will be cutting most of the plant to harvest and dehydrate a large quantity. It is trying to flower, and we want to delay that as much as possible to keep getting more of the fresh new leaves.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A FEW WEEKS MAKES

Plum

Sour Cherry

Pear

Saskatoon

Strawberry

Here are just a few photos of how far along plants have grown over the past few weeks. The plum, sour cherry, pear, saskatoon and apple trees are all in full bloom. I don't know any of the varieties...the saskatoon is in the bush along one side of our property. This, along with our prolific crop of dandelions are keeping our honey-bees extremely happy and busy. Our bee-hives (now 10 in total), are flourishing.

These are 4 of our hives.

WORKSHOPS

This week, we attended two Dig-In Manitoba workshops. The first one was a Seed Starting Workshop, where we learned all about beginning garden seeds indoors. We received a starter kit, with different seeds, soil, etc., and planted them all on Wednesday. We must have perfect conditions for seed germination, because by Saturday, the tomatoes, spaghetti squash and lettuce had all germinated. We've added this to our seeds previously started, and if everything keeps growing, we will most likely be combining peppers and tomatos into our flower gardens to find room for everything.

Here is a photos of our little seed starting area. The tomatoes we started 3 weeks ago in the little pots in the pink planter, are now the beautiful seedlings in the square pots below.  We now have the following started: roma tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, 3 kinds of basil, hot peppers, red peppers, chocolate peppers, lettuce, spaghetti squash, pie pumpkins, cucumbers, and a "surprise" squash that we had saved seeds from in a previous year, but forgot to label.

These seeds, from last month, are the same ones in the photo below:

These seedlings are the ones from the photo above:

 The second workshop was called "Making Manitoba Delicious", and now I can hardly wait for the garden to start producing, so we can enjoy all these great vegetables.

GARDEN PLANNING WITH KIDS

As this amazing spring weather continues, it's hard to not just get outside and plant ALL our seeds right now. But, Manitoba being what it is, we will definately wait a bit longer to put in the warm weather crops. (where the seedlings do not like cool temps). We now have spinach, beets, green onions, garlic, and radishes all up in the garden. We have been harvesting the chives every few days.

This year, each of us has taken control over one of our raised-bed garden sections. We have put no restrictions on what to plant, how to plant, or how to care for our gardens. The kids have complete free range in each of their 4x8 foot sections. We have all agreed that each of us will tend to, weed, water, and harvest their own garden plot. We are also making a garden map, and recording the plant date, germination time, bloom time, first harvest date and last harvest date. Our garden is organic...no pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers, (other that what comes from our compost pile)

Praire girl (age 8) has chosen to plant popcorn, garlic, carrots, and lettuce so far.
Prairie boy (age 13) has chosen radishes, peas, sweet corn, basil, parsley and cucumbers (growing up on a trellis).
Prairie Mom (that's me...I won't be posting my age hahha) has the spinach, tomatos, peppers and beans (growing up on a support).
Prairie Dad is being secretive...he won't share his plans quite yet.
We are eagerly awaiting the Dig Deeper workshop where we will also receive a grow kit for the garden too.

To really learn about the value of growing our own food we will also be tracking the harvest from each plot. We will be tracking both the pounds of food, plus the equal value of the same products in the grocery store if we would have had to purchase it. I'm working on a database that will graph our results as we go.

So far, we have harvested the equavalent of 3 packages of chives..(retail $2.49 each). I've just cleaned up and divided the chives into 3 separate plants...I'm sure the chive harvest will triple later this spring too. We have a small food dehydrator, and I'm looking into whether or not chives are a good candidate for drying, and using in the winter. Our seed cost so far has been $6.00,, so I guess that makes us 50 cents ahead so far.