Growing Produce
Tips and tricks for growing your own food.
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Starting a Garden
A friend of mine had some questions, and I want to answer them for her as quickly as possible. I thought there might be some others who would appreciate the questions she had. How do I compost quickly and easily to make the best garden? There are a lot of ways to compost. If you haven’t already read my post on our compost pile you can read it here. If this is your first spring planting a garden, you are probably too late to do much composting this year. I would start thinking about it for next year though. Composting is a great way to put nutrients back into the…
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Grapes
What do I do with grapes? This was actually my first year really harvesting a good batch of grapes. They were so overgrown when we got here that it was hard to find them and there were not very many. As I may have mentioned previously, this is my grandma’s yard and she loves every growing thing in it. So, even though the grapes were terribly over run and an unrecognizable variety, I resisted the urge to just tear them out and start over. It turns out that that was the right decision. When we moved in I didn’t know a lot about grapes so I scoured the interned to…
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Our Great Peach Tree
Our peaches this year were glorious! My grandma has like eight peach trees. I really like peaches, but I have to say, more than two or three peach trees is probably too many. However, in my grandma’s defense, there are only one or two of each variety. There are early peaches, one white peach tree, some regular free-stone orange peaches, and some cling-stone peach trees. The cling-stone trees are worthless to me. They are the last to ripen and the hardest to use. I hate to even give them away, at least not to friends; they might not stay my friends. There is however, one peach tree that stands above…
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Give Thanks!
This week we celebrated Thanksgiving. It is great to be reminded to give thanks for all that we have. I got so busy toward the end of the summer that I just didn’t do anything on the blog. I put up a lot of fruits and vegetables. I took a lot of pictures and videos; but, I haven’t post anything for a long time. Now that it has started snowing I will take a break from working outside. I got a little bit overwhelmed at the end of the summer/fall. I had so much produce that I was trying to take care of, I just couldn’t do it all. I…
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Compost Pile
It is starting to feel like fall. The leaves have turned colors and are dropping off the trees. There is frost on the ground when we wake up. The garden season is officially over. Time to get ready for winter. This week we pulled up all the plants left in the garden and chopped them for the compost pile. We used a big shredder that my grandpa had in the shed. All the stuff went in whole in one end and came out in pieces on the other end. We also raked the leaves and picked them up with the lawnmower. My hubby did that part. I raked everything away…
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Bringing forth good fruit
My grandma’s orchard has five apple trees, but I normally only think of four of them. The fifth has not been producing very well in the five years we have been here. It puts on apples but not very many and they got wormy and soft really early. I was ready to cut this tree down. Luckily my husband is more considerate of my grandparent’s feelings. My grandma loves every plant in her yard. And it is still her property, we are just trying to help her take care of it. So he endorsed just pruning it well and watching to see what happened. Which we did. Sadly this tree…
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Reviving Raspberries
This raspberry patch has given me a lot of grief. When we moved in over half of the patch was barely even producing. There was grass growing throughout, and most of the stalks were less than 3′ tall. In my online research I learned how to prune or plant raspberries but I didn’t find anything about this particular issue. So I thought I would share my experience so far. We thought about taking everything out and starting with a new variety. But my grandparents always talk about how they got half of the starts from my grandma’s sister Aunt Ann. The other half they got from Bear Lake area which…
