Although it may be a very uninteresting title, it’s not an uninteresting food. I’ll be honest. The garden is in that stage right now where the only thing I’m harvesting is lettuce. Everyone knows how boring lettuce is. It’s just something for ranch, chicken, cheese, and croutons to stick to so you feel like you ate something healthy.
The one thing that I have picked (prematurely) is beets. They were very small, but Kristi was very excited and yanked one out of the ground to eat.
There a few cool things about beets.
They taste like dirt. I just think it’s great that they don’t masquerade as anything but a vegetable that grows in dirt.
You can put them in flipping anything. You can boil them and eat them like a potato. You can put them in salads (after the ranch but before the cheese), you can cut them up and eat them raw. When we picked ours, I threw it in a fruit smoothie. Greens and all. It was great and it made my smoothie purple. So that’s cool.
They’re easy to grow. We planted ours in early spring and have done noting to them but some minor weeding. Kristi thinned them out once and planted the ones she plucked…which added about 10 feet to our row of beets.
Versatile and dirt flavored. That’s what I’m talking about.
As always, start small, think big, and stay healthy!
“I love the smell of fresh tilled dirt in the morning. Smells like…sustainability.” -Me, copying Apocalypse Now
We planted our carrots and beets in our backyard garden sometime in March and they are going crazy!
This is actually something that we learned this year on our homestead. We live in Michigan, and this year in March it was still getting into the high teens and low twenties at night with temperatures barely over 40 on average during the day. We have never planted anything before Memorial Day weekend to be honest with you. This is really the first backyard garden that I’ve started to get outside my norm and plant new things. I usually stick to the zucchini, tomato, peppers, and a few cukes if I’m feeling saucy. This is the first year I’ve played around with root vegetables, all in an attempt to be more sustainable every day.
As soon as the soil temperature picked up above freezing, they all shot up like crazy. So much that I’m actually worried that I messed up and it’s all too good to be true. For real, they look like I started them in a greenhouse.
How do i prep for a garden upgrade?
The point is, if you’re starting to venture outside of your normal tomato and green pepper plants and into a wider variety backyard garden, look into the seeds you’re planting. Heck, they usually have directions right on the packages. Figure out what you want in your garden for NEXT year and plan accordingly. Different plants need to be started/ planted in the garden at different times during different seasons and temperatures. They also require different soil moistures and sunlight. What we have been learning is to find someone who plants in our state and listen to some of their advice. If you’re in Michigan, my wife loves MIgardener. She even ordered the seeds for our backyard garden from them this year.
Where do i find a know-it-all?
Michigan is not the only state with a professional like MIgardener. The internet is chocked full of people much smarter than I am about this stuff who you could probably hit with a rock they are so close to you. YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook all have groups if you can’t find a singular entity with all of the knowledge. I’m actually part of a homesteading group on Facebook. I don’t glean much from the mindless posts, but if I ask a question, I can usually take a “majority rules” approach to the answers I get and figure the rest out on my own.
So here’s your takeaway:
Plan your backyard garden a year ahead
Read up on your seeds
Read up on your climate
Find a professional in your area
Plant Your backyard garden!
As always, start small, think big, and be healthy!
There are many ways to start your seeds before planting season, but here is one that we have found helpful. You can start your seeds in eggshells in 4 easy steps.
Eat eggs (preferably from your own chickens)
Save the eggshells and cartons
Add soil and seed.
Just add water!
It really is that easy. When we eat our eggs, we don’t wash them or anything. Just put the two halves inside each other, back into the hole in the egg carton that you pulled them from, back in the fridge with your uneaten eggs. We eat a lot of eggs around here, so we start saving shells 2-3 weeks before we want to plant (depending on how many seedlings we’re starting). The ones we don’t save go to the compost pile.
Sadly, I don’t have established compost yet, so we buy potting soil. It’s whatever. BUT we put a rabbit pellet in every eggshell with our seeds. Rabbit manure only needs to dry for a week or so and it can be put directly into soil.
We use our rabbit tractors to give our plants some sun in the early spring.
After that, water like you would any other seedling and bada bing, bada boom. You nailed it.
The one thing we are going to try next year (if the greenhouse isn’t built yet) is to buy some of those plastic lids that you would put on aluminum trays and cover the cartons like a mini greenhouse. Right now we carry them in and out everyday to get sunlight and it’s kind of a drag. The worst part is the one night your two year old has a melt down and you forget to bring them in is the one night you get frost and kill your poor little plants. That’s just no bueno.
If you have any other ways or ideas to start seeds I would love to hear them! Leave them in the comments!
