I live, write, and garden in the PNW with my husband of 27 years, disabled daughter, college-aged son, and my 84-year-old mother. We have paid off $250,000.00 worth of debt (if you include the interest) in the last fifteen years and as of 6/12/2020 are 100% DEBT FREE!!!!As you all know by now, we garden. And it saves us a lot of money. For the cost of a large packet of green bean seeds, I grow and can enough green beans for the whole year. I grow enough corn for fresh eating and some for the freezer to have later in the year. I grow and freeze enough zucchini most years to have it once a week all year. And I grow enough tomatoes to do 52 pints of diced canned.
That's all well and good, but I need to grow enough for making tomato sauce and ketchup. I need to grow enough broccoli for the freezer. While I had a good potato harvest, it was not enough to get us through a year without buying. And I skipped onions and long-storing winter squash last year. And the amount of strawberries I grew was not enough. Well, this year I need to grow enough of that, too. And this year we'll be doing our own seed starting.
But first we needed to increase the size of the garden. And we needed to start clean up on last year's garden. We currently have a 20 x 48 foot garden, with 2 old broken down raised beds. We need to finish tearing those out and then put black plastic over the entire area to kill the weeds. Then we are going to bulid raised beds out of free pallet wood and use linseed oil to help preserve the wood, since it is not toxic.
And we needed to clear a new 20 x 20 foot plot just for the potatoes. So that got weed eated, raked up, and then we put down black plastic on a 10 x 20 foot section. We need to finish putting it down over the rest of that area as soon as we get another sunny day.
My son and I managed to get the corn stalks from last year pulled out as the ground was finally soft enough. So our weed pile to take to the green dump is quite high. The next nice day, the bean poles, vines, and strings need to come down, too, so we can weed eat that area and cover it all with black plastic.
It takes longer than you think to get the plastic put down properly and DH has to be available to help and not working. At least the days are long enough to have his help for an hour or so after he is done with work for the day now. And it will only keep lasting longer so stuff can really start getting done. Presuming we have no freezes or snow in the meanwhile.
If you would like to see our progress I made a youtube video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IJTktQNctw I would appreciate any views and likes you could give it. And thank you so much for watching the last one, it made quite a difference.
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