'SPRING'-ING INTO ACTION: GARDEN PLANS, HARVESTS, & QUARANTINES

          In these trying times of quarantine, I've found my comfort in gardening. I mean, I also find it in writing and drinking (tea of course. TEA. I swear!). But mainly in gardening. Whenever I get frustrated or overwhelmed I go out into my garden and feel all of that slip away. It also definitely helps that it's near spring and everything is coming alive!

          I've utterly failed in getting pictures of before and after I cleared out my garden beds, but I do have a video on my Halfway Homestead youtube channel giving a bit of a tour if you want to check it out. But here, here's what was (and is) currently growing in my garden. Soon it'll all go away and be replaced with brand new produce, which I'm super excited to tell you about!

The tomatoes are gone and are replaced with spinach and the trellis is filled with peas!

Garlic to your left, Japanese raised bed to your right (with
dying mustard and all!) and a Carmen avocado tree!

My flower bed still roughly looks like this. It's been a wet & cold winter/early spring, so flowers that need warm weather are finding it hard to adapt. Consequently all of my fruit/nut trees you see are all currently growing fruit now. Oops.

          Since I last left you all there's been a few additions to my garden. A Carmen avocado tree, a Baba Red Raspberry, a black raspberry, a (small) olive tree, and an artichoke plant! I've been busy the last few days collecting, shelling, and freezing peas, pulling out old things and sewing seedlings. So what am I growing this summer you ask (I'm assuming you're asking)?! Why let me tell you!

I have four raised beds, and each year I dedicate my farthest raised bed to a different country. This year it's Japan. I've already grown buckweat, mustard, mizuna, cabbage, carrots, and turnips there and already planted late spring/summer crops!

Japanese Bed: Buckwheat, mizuna, lettuce, soy beans, adzuki beans, Tokyo cucumber (going up the trellis)

Herb Bed: Anise, rue, chamomile, savory, majoram, oregano, garlic chives, Ojo de Tigre beans (going up the trellis)

Sauce Bed: ALL OF THE TOMATOES. Rosella, Pantano Romanesco, San Marzano, Princepe, and one other I can't remember the name of off the top of my head

3 Sisters Garden Bed: Hopi blue corn, red kuri squash, trail of tears black beans (bush), Ojo de Tigre beans (pole, growing up the trellis) 

I'm also going to be growing in the small strips of land I'm allowed to cultivate in my (rental) backyard! I'll be growing Roselles (it's a flower that you grow for the calyx that you use for tea that tastes like cranberries! yum!), Snacking Sunflowers (they have GIANT seeds for eating!), fava beans--or at least I HOPE I have fava beens. The seedlings I sprouted are looking....weird. Snowcap beans, black turtle beans, and--maybe--peanuts!

In my three 10 gallon grow bags I'm growing my BIG tomatoes, Robeson, Purple Cherokee, and Russian Purple. I

As you can see, I have a LOT of  things growing. This stuff is just my 'annual' stuff, by the way!

In my 'prennial' section I have my Braeburn apple tree producing apples, my almond tree producing nothing (WHY?), and my Santa Rosa Plum tree LOADED with fruit! My two gooseberry plants that I thought for sure were dead were in fact just sleep and are hard at work growing! My raspberries and producing raspberries and this year I'm going to be be buried alive--we can hope--with boysenberries!

My black raspberries are looking like they'll never bud out,  but I've got my fingers crossed! My blueberries are doing great though! Look at em! They'll be ready for harvest any day now (she says wishfully)!

          I've also used the quarantine to do a lot of research, reading, and experimenting. I've made my very first batch of fire cider, (I'll post the recipe and directions here when it's finished fermenting), coleslaw entirely from my garden veggies, and a LOT of medicinal oils from herbs/flowers I've grown or foraged! I'll be making them into medicinal salves and lotions, all of which I'll explain on another post.

          I've also attempted to make bread a few times and man, lemme tell you friends, I cannot make bread well. It always, ALWAYS ends up too dense. I don't know how. I don't know why. It just does. I really need to take a bread class or something so someone can in person tell me what kneaded dough FEELS like.

          I'm hoping this summer will be productive both in my garden and in my writing--because if I want to be able to get land to have a massive garden of food, I need to have books that'll sell well enough for that to happen!

          Thank you for sticking with me, or joining me if you're new here! I'm going to be much better about updating this blog and I'll have tons of recipes--both for food and medicinal things! So stay tuned because this'll be updated every Sunday!

         How are you spring plans coming along? What are you going to grow? Do you preserve your harvest, or do you eat it all as it grows? I'd love to know! In the meantime, enjoy this picture of my new kitten Denali, and some of my herbal oils that he almost knocked over.