Cosmo spring garden 2023

[Cosmo spring garden]

Happy new year everyone!
I have enjoyed having a place to post all my garden updates. It is fun to go back and look at them at the end of the year and learn from the mistakes.

I thought it would be fun to start with some of my goals for 2023 garden. I have learned from past not to go too heavy on goals lol. So here are some that I'd like to accomplish this year.

1. Put up a new garden fence that is more durable.
2. Move strawberry bed. The current location is where our greenhouse will go.
3. Plant more blueberries
4. Have a smaller garden. We will have 2 50'X25' areas in production. At least that is the plan!
5. Don't buy too many seeds! I did a seed inventory and am going to try my best to not spend a lot of seeds this year. I plan to stick with tried and true varieties and use my own saved seeds.
6. Use the small greenhouse more.
7. Plant variety of beans that are great for dry beans.
8. Set up farm stand and get few friends that may want a weekly produce box. Kind of a lazy CSA.
9. Help my kids more with their garden. Last year they were overwhelmed with their garden because I didn't have time to help them. I really want them to enjoy gardening and help them.
10. Enjoy the garden! I plan to be intentional about sitting down and enjoying the garden this year.

Please post your garden goals for 2023!

 

[Cosmo spring garden]

Made pizza sauce using dehydrated tomatoes. DH and DD like it but DS didn't. He is picky so I'm not counting his opinion .
I have lots of dehydrated tomatoes that I need to use up and am excited about this option. I have a feeling it will make good soup too!
To rehydrate I poured 1.5 cups of boiling water over 1 cup of dehydrated cherry tomatoes and let sit covered for 4 hours. Pureed in a blender. It made almost a paste consistency, maybe a bit thinner.
For the pizza sauce:
Saute one onion in some olive oil until its caramelized, add garlic, Italian season, salt, pepper and a bit of sugar. Add tomato puree and additional water if you want thinner sauce. Let it cook for few minutes, stirring regularly to prevent burns. Let cool before spreading it on crust.

 

[Zeedman]

I'm in uncharted territory, still trying to make the transition from what was always "our" garden, to what is now "my" garden. Just focusing on having a garden, testing my limits, and trying to preserve as much of my collection as possible. Looking for more efficient ways to accomplish garden tasks, and hopefully finding a few collaborators to help. DD & the Grandson have been helpful (as has one of my brothers) and a new highly-motivated SSE member nearby may be able to arrange some timely help from local university Ag students. Hopefully this will allow me to cultivate at least part of the rural garden this year.

At the top of my priorities is the continuation of the "Little Greenseed" pumpkin breeding project, which showed much better results than expected last year. Also the continuation of a potato-onion breeding project from the Experimental Farm Network, which I have yet to post about ("Little Greenseed" began as another EFN project). Also will be making a strong effort to get a good seed crop from the super-early flint corn "Gaspe", which seems to be hovering at the edge of extinction.

And continuing the soil building in the rural garden that was begun last year, in an effort to restore its fertility. May begin the search for an alternate garden site too this year, given that the property owner (also recently widowed) has informed me that she will be selling & moving in a few years. It would take at least a year to properly prepare a new site; but given that garlic is a two-year crop, she has promised to warn me well in advance.

But the big project - between now & the end of February - is the cleaning & re-organization of my freezers, and the shift from predominantly room temperature seed storage, to frozen storage. Four 4-drawer file cabinets of seed!!! All of my bulk-packaged seed needs to be divided, repackaged, and labeled... and that will be an enormous project (all inventory records will change as well). After packaging what I expect to either use or share, most of the beans & soybeans will remain in the cabinets until they fail germination... at which point the empty cabinets will become my SHTF storage. All seed collected but not yet grown will be frozen too, since I don't know when I will get to it.

A lot of soul searching this year, as I try to decide how much of my collection I can realistically maintain, how many new projects I may be able to take on, and how much will regretfully need to be dropped. I will be saying goodbye to a lot of varieties that I love, and hopefully find new homes for at least a few of those.

 

[Cosmo spring garden]

I'm in uncharted territory, still trying to make the transition from what was always "our" garden, to what is now "my" garden. Just focusing on having a garden, testing my limits, and trying to preserve as much of my collection as possible. Looking for more efficient ways to accomplish garden tasks, and hopefully finding a few collaborators to help. DD & the Grandson have been helpful (as has one of my brothers) and a new highly-motivated SSE member nearby may be able to arrange some timely help from local university Ag students. Hopefully this will allow me to cultivate at least part of the rural garden this year.

At the top of my priorities is the continuation of the "Little Greenseed" pumpkin breeding project, which showed much better results than expected last year. Also the continuation of a potato-onion breeding project from the Experimental Farm Network, which I have yet to post about ("Little Greenseed" began as another EFN project). Also will be making a strong effort to get a good seed crop from the super-early flint corn "Gaspe", which seems to be hovering at the edge of extinction.

And continuing the soil building in the rural garden that was begun last year, in an effort to restore its fertility. May begin the search for an alternate garden site too this year, given that the property owner (also recently widowed) has informed me that she will be selling & moving in a few years. It would take at least a year to properly prepare a new site; but given that garlic is a two-year crop, she has promised to warn me well in advance.

But the big project - between now & the end of February - is the cleaning & re-organization of my freezers, and the shift from predominantly room temperature seed storage, to frozen storage. Four 4-drawer file cabinets of seed!!! All of my bulk-packaged seed needs to be divided, repackaged, and labeled... and that will be an enormous project (all inventory records will change as well). After packaging what I expect to either use or share, most of the beans & soybeans will remain in the cabinets until they fail germination... at which point the empty cabinets will become my SHTF storage. All seed collected but not yet grown will be frozen too, since I don't know when I will get to it.

A lot of soul searching this year, as I try to decide how much of my collection I can realistically maintain, how many new projects I may be able to take on, and how much will regretfully need to be dropped. I will be saying goodbye to a lot of varieties that I love, and hopefully find new homes for at least a few of those.

@Zeedman looks like you will have a busy year! I hope everything goes well for you and that people will come and help and ease the burden. I appreciate and admire people like you who work hard to keep seed varieties from going extinct.
Could you not find any other breeders to take over some of the varieties? Asking because I don't know how that works.
I didn't realize that when you said rural garden in your posts that it was on borrowed land. I think that's great that you can put the land to use.

 

[Cosmo spring garden]

Didn't take a picture but we finished putting up the garden fence. The entire space is 50'x100' with two gates. We tried gardening without a fence last year and while deer left most things alone, our dog ate a lot of our sweet and flint corn . She got fat too!
Our thought is to keep our chickens and rabbits(in their hutches) in 1/4 section of the garden and the other 3/4 will be in production or cover cropped. Not sure how this will all play out but we love experiments.


Guess what else??

We are going tomorrow to look at some dairy goats! Nigerian dwarfs .
I am excited that the seller is only 30 minutes away from me and will be available for any questions I may have! I'm so excited!

 

[Branching Out]

Way to go on getting that huge fence in place. Your new experimental garden sounds very exciting. I love garden experiments too! At our cabin in Washington we are playing catch-up, given that we weren't able to go there for two years and many of the shrubs grew rampantly during our COVID absence. We removed a couple of 500 lb Sharp Leaf Spruce last September, so I mulched the area with compost and scattered a cover crop mix (from True Leaf Market, with a blend of 9 seeds) to protect the soil from the winter rains. This was a bit of a leap of faith as I am new to cover cropping-- but the seeds sprouted very quickly, and the patch is now a bright green shaggy carpet of foliage. (I think the deer are keeping it trimmed for us.) I used the same cover crop mix last spring in an area plagued by horsetails, and from my observations I think it improved the soil a lot.

 

[Cosmo spring garden]

Well, we did it. Put down a deposit for two doelings that will be coming to our homestead sometimes in March. The seller is very knowledgeable and will be available for any newbie goat owner questions I may have. Which will be a lot .
She has registered nigerian dwarf goats and registers all her does so the price per goat is more than we had hoped for but she is close and has a close herd and is a great resource for questions.
Now to build a shelter and a pen!

I'm excited and nervous!
Any goat owners here?

OK, back to gardening.


What new veggies are you planning to grow this season? For me is couple of new varieties of flour corn and sweet Corn that are open pollinated.
And beans.
And tomatoes.
And peppers.
And flowers.
And onions.
And peas.
Hi my name is cosmospring and I am a seed addict....and I like it!

 

[Cosmo spring garden]

Another rainy Sunday here so couldn't do much outside. Which is fine because I really have been neglecting proper nutritional meals for my family. DH took kids to Lowes to buy supplies for a goat shelter so I took that time to bake bread, make waffles,tomatoes soup from dehydrated cherry tomatoes, granola and grind up spelt berries that have been in storage far too long. And organized couple of kitchen cabinets. I also took out some ingredients from the pantry for some weekday meals.
I am a creature of habit and will reach for easy convenient foods if that's what's within reach. I really need to use up some canned chili beans, crackers, ect.
As for the bread, I make 2 dozen dinner rolls/hamburger buns, 2 loves sandwich bread and 2 loaves artisan bread. That should last us all week.

Also whipped up a batch of oatmeal patties to use as burgers. We are vegetarian but rarely eat what I call "fake meat". I think it's too processed and gross . So I make oatmeal patties that are smothered in home canned BBQ sauce and taste amazing!

I am doing a pantry challenge for the month of January and February to really use up all the neglected stored food. This also helps me know what to grow more/less of this season. It's almost end of January and honestly I haven't even started using most of the neglected ingredients. I may have to extend it in to March. I wonder how DH will take that news .
I still buy fresh produce and dairy as needed but really focus on the home canned/grown/frozen/dehydrated foods.

 

[Cosmo spring garden]

Lasagna will be for dinner. This lasagna is loaded with home grown/made/canned pasta sauce, cheezy sauce made with homegrown potatoes, and many other "little" things that were preserved from last years garden. Meals like this remind me to preserve more greens like spinach and tat soi so i can use those. Looking forward to a wonderful dinner with my family as we welcome the Sabbath

 

[ducks4you]

I'm in uncharted territory, still trying to make the transition from what was always "our" garden, to what is now "my" garden. Just focusing on having a garden, testing my limits, and trying to preserve as much of my collection as possible. Looking for more efficient ways to accomplish garden tasks, and hopefully finding a few collaborators to help. DD & the Grandson have been helpful (as has one of my brothers) and a new highly-motivated SSE member nearby may be able to arrange some timely help from local university Ag students. Hopefully this will allow me to cultivate at least part of the rural garden this year.

Parying for you borther!
Give away varieties that you cannot grow right now and they will come back to you.
It's a God thing.
I gave away the horse that became my favorite. He wasn't completely broken in, I had a riding student who had won an Arabian--Corporal (1982-2007, RIP) was an Arabian)--but her horse was still green and it gave her a horse that was ridable.
ONE YEAR LATE, she called and asked if I wanted my horse back, so I got him back for the rest of his life.