2021 Vegetable Garden Preparation!

We are in full blow garden prep mode! My husband, Lane, tilled the existing three and a half rows and added one and a half, so now we have five 75 foot (approximately) rows filled with good quality soil. He had four yards of garden soil delivered last Thursday and he shoveled and shaped all five rows into garden perfection! The kids were absolutely thrilled to have a giant dirt hill to play on again this year.

We all have our favorite fruits and veggies - Emily loves the strawberries (which she used to pronounce "star-babies", the cutest thing ever), baby Thomas likes to eat the strawberries, too, but also picks a lot of peppers and gnaws on them as he wanders around. His favorite vegetable is our homegrown zucchini - he'll happily eat it with breakfast (sauteed with scrambled eggs), and with lunch and dinner. Sam's favorite is watermelon and Lane likes everything, I think, but tomatoes in particular as well as the lettuce and hot peppers. My absolute favorite are tomatoes of all sizes, colors, and shapes.

Since we wanted to till and amend the soil, but were still growing quite a variety of vegetables out there, we saved three artichoke plants (one with an artichoke that's just about ready to eat!), several giant Ailsa Craig onions (the Baker Creek package says these regularly get up to 5lbs), evergreen long white bunching onions, Japanese giant red mustard, and about 20 garlic plants (which I cut the tops off of hoping to encourage bulb development). We got the clever idea from Jess at Roots & Refuge to create a little strawberry patch out of an old kiddy pool, so I dug up most of our strawberry plants and replanted them in the kids' old cracked pool. Can't wait to see how they do!

Even though it's still very early, Sam and I went out yesterday and planted three types of beets (Detroit dark red, Chioggia/Bassano [candy cane striped], and golden), Striped Japonica corn, Jubilee watermelons, Manzano peppers (we saved those seeds from peppers I purchased at the grocery store last year), California sweet peppers, and Quadrato D'Asti Rosso (sweet red peppers).

I went a little wild with my Baker Creek order and ordered somewhere around 50 seed packets. Until that order arrives our current seed inventory (pictured below) includes, in addition to what's listed above, the following. We grow mostly heirlooms, but we have a few hybrids as well:

• Berkeley Tie Dye Pink tomatoes

• Dr. Wyche's yellow tomatoes

• Mushroom basket tomatoes

• Musquee de provence squash (beautiful cheese wheel looking pumpkins)

• Big max pumpkins

• Jack O'lantern pumpkins

• Fordhook zucchini

• Dark green zucchini

• Dixie Hybrid yellow squash

• Montana Cudu corn

• Strawberry popcorn

• Russian red kale

• Dwarf blue curled kale

• Italian salad blend

• Green salad bowl lettuce

• Straight eight cucumber

• Sugar daddy peas

• Lemon basil

• Sweet basil

• Hearts of gold melon (I think it's a cantaloupe)

• Peach seeds we saved from a flat we purchased at a farmer's market last year

Once we have our order from Baker Creek I'll update what we have to put in the ground! Can't wait!!!