Gardening Archives |

Harvesting Carrots: From Dirt to Freezer

November 10, 2018 By Laura 1 Comment

It’s the most beautiful time of the Fall season here in New England, with tree foliage at the peak of their most vibrant colors, on show. Soon, the leaves will be falling all around us, and swirling around our feet, as we go from here to there. The gardening season for this year, is surely all but behind us. Looking back, we’ve had a wonderful and productive season, for which we are very thank for.

(August 2018 – when all was thriving.)

Now that we are well into this Fall season, where all that grows comes to the end of life, little by little the Fall clean up in our organic gardens has been done, and all looks barren and just about ready for a long winter’s nap.

One of the last fruits of our labors to reap, is the harvesting of our organic, non-GMO carrots!

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Harvesting Carrots

Everyone has their own ways of doing things when it comes to harvesting and processing the vegetation that comes from their gardens. You just tend to find a system that works best for you, with a little experience. In this post, we thought we would take you through how we get our carrots from the ground to the freezer, in the way that we find to be the fastest and easiest manner.

In the spirit of sharing, the variety of carrots we have been growing are Shin Kurodas. The bright orange roots of this type of carrots typically grow five to six inches long. But honestly, we have pulled up a wide range of sizes, depending on how close they are grown together, or how long we have left them in the ground, growing, since we often harvest as needed; ground to table. This type of carrot is stump-rooted in shape, and are tender and sweet flavored.

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As fun as carrots are to grow, they are even more fun to harvest! It’s rather exciting to them pull up out of the earth, one after the other, and see how big (or small) each one is going to be. Ripping the roots from the ground is also rather therapeutic and gratifying, if we do say so ourselves. (Fall clean up in general, is gratifying, in that light.)

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Here we have one of the biggest carrots we have grown to date. It was mammoth, compared to the others.

I’d say it was well over 9″. It had a healthy girth, as well. Me and O couldn’t even wrap our fingers around it towards the top.
(Although admittedly, us girls don’t have the biggest hands.)

O.k., let’s get to our process.
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From Dirt to Freezer:

Our Process of Harvesting Carrots

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The Fruits of the Accidental Jack-Be-Little Pumpkin Patch

October 13, 2018 By Laura Leave a Comment

If you’re a gardener, you know as well as we do that it can be full of surprises! For example, we’ve shared with you about the surprising amusement of the accidental, ever-growing Jack-Be-Little pumpkin patch in our gardens, on our social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram, and gave you a peek of it at the time. So we thought maybe you’d be interested in reading the short tale, and know what fruits that came of that accidental Jack-Be-Little pumpkin patch, in the end!

And by the way, if you’d like to follow us on our other social media, as we invite you to, you’ll see our social media buttons in the right-hand sidebar of our blog here. See them? Old colorful wood boards?
Click on them to get to us on Facebook or Instagram, to ‘Like and/or ‘Follow’ us. And don’t worry, they’ll open in a separate window, so you won’t need to find your way back here. Because we gotchu.

The Pumpkin Patch Madness……

The photo above is the ever-growing patch in progress in our gardens, and frankly, as shown here, it wasn’t nearly done taking over….well, almost everything!
You could say it got out of control. But then, that’s what pumpkin patches of any kind do. They need ample rambling room. And if you don’t give it to them, they’ll just go head and take it!

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What in the Heck?!….

We first saw it started in one of our raised beds. To be honest, we actually weren’t even sure exactly what it was, when it first started growing. We thought maybe cucumbers. Then we realized, no, no, it seems to be a squash.

Next thing we knew, [Read more…]

Blooming Beauty Around the Gardens and Yard | June 2018

June 25, 2018 By Laura 5 Comments

Just a short but lovely post, to share with you all the beauty of the flowers blooming all around us, that we have been enjoying every day around here. We have a long list of vegetables growing in the garden beds as well right now, that most likely we will show you at a later date. This early in the season, however, they all have much more growing and producing to do, and they are hardly worth photographing quite yet.

But oh, the flowers blooming!

As you will see, this year we went crazy with Superbell – Calibrachoa hybrids, by Proven Winner. And we have to say, I think they are a favorite we’ll be sticking with, year after year, from here on out! They are so easy to maintain! They are tolerant of the heat, the occasions we didn’t get to watering, and there is never any deadheading to be done! We’ve got them in all kinds of colors, blooming all over the place, and couple of other kinds of flowers as well to let you take in, as well.
Let us show you!

This wooden bucket holds a bountiful spillage mix of Superbells in Plum and Chiffon, as well as some Snowstorm Giant Snowflake. So in love with it.

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Fall Garden and Home Outdoor Decor

October 15, 2017 By Laura 2 Comments

Fall is here, and while nature readies itself to bless us with the year’s annual grand finale display of beauty in New England, our gardens had found it time to wither and fade, with an early prep for a long winter rest. Especially since we opted to not plant anything new for a fall harvest this first season in our new garden area. We still have lots of carrots in the ground, and we’re still picking peppers of all kinds. But everything else was pretty much done. So with a good wait in front of us before a pure blanket of white snow covers all that is post-life and ugly, we wanted to keep the beauty going a little longer, with some festive Fall garden and home outdoor decor. We thought you might enjoy seeing the photos of our efforts.

We worked with an abundance of the typical Fall elements: Glorious mums in a variety of shades, pumpkins of various kinds, straw bales, cornstalks, and gourds. But we also planted our first big arrangement in a huge whiskey barrel, and we’re excited to show you that!

We had started getting everything ready to go, but then Storm Jose’ was heading our way. So we put many plants out behind our house in a more sheltered area to wait. Besides, we were also still having some days that felt a whole lot like summer. The heat is no good for many of these cool-loving plants, so keeping them in the shade until things cooled down a bit, was the right thing to do, also. (Even though I was so excited to get working on making everything FALL TIME, like the calendar said!)
The days came where I couldn’t wait any longer. So we got to work over a weekend, and banged it all out.
Then we smiled.
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Here’s an overvew of the fenced garden. We’ll give you a closer look around in a minute. But let’s talk about the fresh layer of straw over all of the beds first. We use it all gardening season long around the plants in the beds as a mulch, to protect the soil from the sun. It does a great job of keeping the beds moist, and not drying out to a dush in the heat. It’s important to be sure you are using straw in gardening though, as opposed to hay, because hay has seeds, and unless you are going for wheat fields, you really don’t want all these seeds falling on your garden soil.

The straw is not only a beautiful golden color for a Fall look, but throughout the bitter winter here in New England it helps protect any perrenial plants buried in the garden beds, holding in some heat from the earth. Come spring thaw, what is broken down can just be turned into the soil with other more enriching compost.

Ok, less talk, more photos, now.

Our garden-entry gates.
Come on in.
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A Privacy Fence with an Eclectic Decorative Flair

July 5, 2017 By Laura 1 Comment

A privacy fence certainly serve it’s purpose well. But it can also appear really unfriendly, sterile and boring. And everyone knows we especially don’t like boring.
So having had the plan to put up a 6 foot privacy fence around our new front yard garden sanctuary, we started brainstorming on how we could give our own new privacy fence a creative and unique, eclectic decorative flair.

Because especially right on the street like this, and partially blocking the view of the house from the front angle, we knew it was going to just look a little . . . . well, as we said, a little unfriendly, sterile and boring. And not necessarily nice looking in any way. And we wanted it to look nice! Our goal was to customize the fence, and alter the whole feel if it in some way, while still allowing the fence to serve it’s purpose of privacy.

And I think we came up with a pretty great idea! We really love where it’s going, anyway.
It’s going to look even nice, when we have plantings all along the front of the fence as well as along the side.
Probably Hostas, but maybe some ornamental grasses, too. We just haven’t gotten that far yet.
It was recently lined with spring tulips, but they are died out now.

NOTE also . . . .
. . . . that like the gardens area, the fence decor itself is not done yet, either. We will be adding to it in time, as well, without going overboard. But we feel like it’s an appealing improvement!

Take a look at what we did. . . .
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