In years past, we have spent many hours canning, dehydrating, fermenting, and freezing our fruits and vegetables.  Lately, the children are eating more and more of the produce straight from the garden, so I find there is less need to preserve. Strawberries almost always go straight into everyone’s mouth. If there are extras, they get…

I am a big fan of perennials because you can plant them once and they come back year after year.  In our vegetable garden, the only perennial “vegetable” that we plant is asparagus.  I love it because it is the first vegetable to come up in the spring and is pretty easy to grow and…

I love herbs. I love to cook with them. I love to eat them fresh. I love to smell them. I love to watch them bloom. I love to use them in herbal remedies. I even love to use them in soap. When it came time to determine where to plant my herbs at the…

Having access to our own fruit is absolutely wonderful.  In our orchard we plant not only tree fruit, but berries as well.  At the new house, we’re working on establishing our orchard.  It’s still in the early stages and looks rough compared to my “dream garden“.  But it will get there. Afterall, the first apple trees…

There are a lot of vegetable plants that benefit from being supported.  For our tomatoes, we generally use tomato cages* that are strengthened with t-posts*.  For other vining vegetables and berries, we use cattle panel trellises.  To make the trellis, we pound in* four t-posts.  Then we get a bunch of people to grab the cattle…

Once we had all of our garden beds built, we had to decide how to lay out the plants within the beds.   We try to spread out our vegetables so we have a little bit of everything everywhere. We also rotate our vegetables and don’t plant them in the same location year after year.…

One of the main reasons that I have a garden is so that I can have a reliable source of healthy vegetables for my children to eat.  I have found that even organic vegetables aren’t necessarily grown in nutrient-rich soil.  And if the soil isn’t nutriet-dense, the vegetables grown in that soil won’t be nutrient…

If there is one chore in the garden that causes me stress, it is weeding.  Not the day-to-day weeding, but when the weeds get out of control! In every garden I’ve ever had, at some point throughout the growing season, the weeds got ahead of me.  So when it came to my dream garden, I…

I grew up in  New Jersey – the “Garden State”.  We always watered our garden.  But when I moved out to Indiana, I was shocked that few people watered their gardens.  My neighbor (an avid gardener) let his garden die the summer we had a drought rather than water it. So if you don’t water…

Jim and I have built many, many raised beds in our time.  But for my “dream garden”, we had our contractor do the work!  First we decided to make use of a low spot that was very conveniently located, but not good for much else. Brandyn broke out the spray paint and we talked about how wide…

I have gardened for most of my life.  It’s something I love and something I teach my children to love. Right now, the kids (especially Emery) do a lot of the work in the garden.  But when I was designing my dream garden, I wanted to make sure that I would be able to maintain…

I have lived and gardened in many different homes over the years.  And what I have discovered, is that where you choose to locate your garden is essential to how well you take care of your garden.  The adage, “Out of sight, out of mind” applies to your gardens.  So when we moved to the new…

I’ve posted a lot of photos of my garden (which I consider my “dream garden”) on Facebook. It’s pretty impressive (if I do say so myself) and people always want to know more.  So I’ve put together a comprehensive series on gardening that I’m hoping will answer everyone’s questions. Our family devotes a lot of time…