Growing Produce
Tips and tricks for growing your own food.
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Plum Fruit Leather
Our plum tree did pretty well this year. It doesn’t usually produce a ton of fruit which is good, because I don’t know what I would do with any more plums. My favorite way to use them currently is to make fruit leather. Plums get very sweet on the inside, but the skin stays pretty tart. And they are so juicy, they can be so messy to eat. Unless you pick them before they get ripe. But then they are super tart. As you may have noticed, I am not exactly sure how I feel about eating plums. I can’t say they are my favorite, but I do enjoy them.…
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Pickled beets
This year we dicided to try a new variety of beets. They are supposed to be striped like a peppermint candy. They turned out to be really pretty. Unfortunately they don’t look quite as good pickled as the good old dark red ones. But, they taste just as good. Maybe even better. It’s hard for me to compare because the last time we grew beets I was expecting our second baby and I was a bit nauseous when I was doing the pickled beets. I had to fight to overcome my association with morning sickness and beets. I have been dragging my feet a bit actually. This time around Tyler…
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Squash
This year when we did our compost pile we threw in a couple pumpkins from two different varieties and some Hubbard squash. We thought, with it being so cold, that all the seeds would be frozen. But come spring we saw patches like this picture below all over the garden where we had spread our compost. My husband calls the plants that come up on their own “volunteers”. Which I have no doubt is a common term. I just wasn’t into gardening much before we moved here so I had never heard it. With all these volunteer squash plants we didn’t have to plant any of the pumpkin or squash…
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Garden Watering System
My husband is very good at solving problems. He is always innovating to make things work better in our home and garden. This year he had some great ideas for our watering system in the garden. There is a lot to it and I mostly just want to document that it happened. If you would like more details I will happily write more. Otherwise, I am just going to let the pictures do the talking. Here in this great state of Utah we don’t get enough rain to keep our plants growing so we have to devise ways to get water to our plants. In the past we have used…
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Why I Prune Fruit Trees
If you have a fruit tree, you should prune it. I have learned this through personal experience. The first time we pruned my grandparents trees we had a bunch of family come and help. We were only planning on staying for one semester (ha ha, so much for plans) and it had been a few years since the trees had been pruned. I figured I would learn a lot. I was totally shocked when my family members started asking my opinion on which branches to cut. I quickly realized how clueless I really was. When we didn’t end up moving out at the end of the semester I decided I…
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Turning Compost
One of the things we do during the winter to make our garden better is to keep a compost pile. My husband is the one who really gets credit for this. I am just along for the ride, but I am learning a lot. I have posted about compost before, so I won’t go into detail about how we get the compost pile going. Just read the other post if you want to know more. This month we have turned it a couple of times, and I got some really great pictures that I wanted to show you. After we finished turning it. (Yes, I actually took a turn pitching…
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Starting Seeds Inside
Last week, February 6th, We woke up to a foot of snow on the ground. And yet, we thought it would be a good idea to start our seeds. A little crazy. But, it also gives me hope that the dark cold days will end at some point. We decided to try planting our own starts again this year because we have a few varieties of plants that we really liked and we are not sure if they will be available at the nurseries near us. By the time we find out, it would be too late. Two years ago we found a variation of the Santa Fe pepper that…
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Why Garden?
I was surprised by how much I have enjoyed gardening. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, such as myself, are encouraged to be self sufficient. One way we can increase our self sufficiency is by growing our own food. My parents and grandparents have always had gardens. As a kid I often helped in the garden. I have good and bad memories of that I usually got the impression from my parents that it was something that we should do and not something that they wanted to do. That may have just been because I was a kid and didn’t really want to be pulling weeds.…
