We’re such tightwads that we save seeds from year to year. We’ve gotten some interesting squash hybrids that way, and have dubbed one variety “zukezilla.” It might be a hybrid between a sugar pumpkin and a zucchini. Whatever they are, they’re good for stuffing. Most seeds come true.
There are some things I want to order from the garden porn seed catalogs. We’re not going to dig up the asparagus patch we put in at the old house, so I want to order 30 or so crowns. The old rule about not harvesting the spears until year two or three isn’t quite right. They can be harvested the first year, as long as you don’t snap off more than about a third of them from any one crown. I’ll need Jersey Knight because our soil is heavy rocky clay.
We do have berry canes around here, but no blueberry bushes or black raspberries. We also have no fruit trees, as far as I can tell, unless there are some crab apples in the woods, which are usually pretty worthless. I’d like to at least get an apple tree (Honeycrisp?), and a pear tree. Maybe a couple of dwarf cherry trees, too, and a fig. The birds will love the cherries, but if I get a dwarf variety, it won’t be such an ordeal to toss some netting over them. Pretty much any kind of plum is hardy in USDA zone 6, but if I get a peach tree, I’ll have to pay attention to the variety to make sure it’ll grow this far north. My granny in Iowa, before she died, used to make scrummylicious plum jam from the tree in her front yard.
I’m not completely sure how much sun the fenced in garden we do have gets. I’ll know more when the trees start leafing out. It’s maybe only about 15′ x 30′, with three raised beds. It might work for some root veggies, and the asparagus, but it might not be enough for anything in the nightshade family that produces fruit above ground, such as tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. Canteloupes are going to want full sun for most of the day, as are the summer and winter squash. I still have a few banana squashes and butternuts that I harvested last September. They’re a bitch to butcher, but they make fantastic soup.
Perhaps I should make a list of things we intend to grow, and take it over to our neighbors to ask if there’s anything on it they wouldn’t want — or catch one of them out in their yard, and ask in person. It just seems wrong to keep taking their eggs with no reciprocation whatsoever, especially when we know that at some point during the growing season, we’re going to end up with far more of several things that we can consume (or can, or pickle).
The only part that sucks is that in order to have a kitchen garden in full sun for most of the day, we’re going to have to dig up part of our side yard. We have a wonderful small tractor that could do the job, but as of now, we don’t have a disk or tiller attachment that’ll fit the three point hitch. Maybe we can find a used one at a barn sale for a good price. If not, we can always have the place that sold us the tractor order a new one for us, for a couple of grand. Not sure I want to spend that much on an attachment that we’ll only use once or twice a year, though. Also, we’ll have to put up some pretty high fencing around it to keep out the deer, rabbits, and our neighbors’ chickens. Oh, well. First world problems, right?
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