Backyard Garden

Garden update from June 12th. Lavender bed Lettuce (asian greens mix) gone to flower already in the background and the salad we were eating in the foreground. Kale! The herb garden and the beautiful sage flowers. Napa cabbage. Tomato plants and marigolds in the large tubs, we grow them on the south side of the house by the driveway and they do very well there! Plus they don't crowd out the other plants...they get very large. Flowering chives int he herb garden. Storage cabbage. Beets coming up. Daikon radish coming up. White turnips ready to eat. More lettuce... Scarlet runner beans and pickling cukes in half barrels.

We bought our house 12 years ago, and our backyard was filled with concrete and a giant pool. It lasted one year before we had it filled in because it was a pool, and we live in Maine. Our entire property is only .15 of an acre, and we've always wanted it to be a garden. You can see on this blog a few of the things we've tried with some success. Our first gardens were raised bed square foot gardens with the fluffiest soil we could put together. They looked cute, and they did alright. Those morphed as the wood we used to build the raised beds decayed like they were supposed to. For the past five years, we have had one long raised bed in the back yard. The first year it was full of vegetables, and it was insanely full. The following year we did the same, but weeds took over, and we ignored it. The next year we changed the raised bed into an herb garden, and it was perfect. We grew tomatoes in pots around the driveway and back porch, and the raised bed was full of mints, flower...

It is that time of year and this year it is early. We went strawberry picking on Sunday and got 35 pounds of pure summer. They are the most lovely fragrant strawberries and not like anything they pass off for strawberries at the supermarket all other times of the year. We froze half and made jam from the other half. I broke our white sugar fast to make jam, which takes a lot of sugar and it needs to be subtlety flavored so you can actually get the flavor of the fruit. There is something magical about jam in January when you crack open a jar and can smell and taste the fruit as it is the day you pick those berries. I think I will always fall back to plain sugar for this process, because of the amazing results. We went to Stevenson's in Wayne, Maine again this year because they consistently have good berries every year. Although I almost went to a new place that opened and is organic. I am hoping next year we have time to try them and see what they have to offer for the extra dollar ...