Garden 2020

     I thought it would be fun to do a post on our garden this year even though I've scattered pictures of it throughout the year. We feel so blessed being able to spend our summers at the Standard's ranch, and especially the use of a garden plot.We spent hours and hours down there and I absolutely loved it. This is the first time I had a garden without tiny children and definitely enjoyed it more then ever too! For some reason I cannot keep houseplants alive but I'd say the garden did ok :). 

Rennee gave me all her seeds and I had already bought a bunch so we had a great selection!

Planting potatoes. I made the rows and the children did 99% of the planting.

Eldon dumped several tractor loads of old compost from the corrals into it and tilled it in good. It made for some gorgeous dirt! We planted our early crops around the end of April.

I decided to start my own peppers and tomatoes since there was lots of seeds in the stash. But most of them died shortly after sprouting. It was fun trying!

Around the end of May the local greenhouse closed for the season and he gave me a great deal on tomato plants. They were half grown already!

Onions and lettuce in May.

It took stuff so long to come up!

Gorgeous little potato blossoms.

The children and I had a great routine of getting up and eating, doing an hour of school, an hour in the garden, then an iced coffee break.

Middle of June - still slow!

     One frustration we dealt with was watering. Sprinklers work great most places but in Montana, it's so often windy that when it feels calm, in all reality there is still enough of a breeze to blow the water around. Tomatoes don't like to be sprinkle watered either (I read this on the internet so I'm sure it's true 😜) and we had geniusly planted them smack in the middle of the garden so that complicated it. We love soaker hoses but by the time we realized it, Runnings was all sold out.

      So we tried some trench irrigating one Sunday afternoon when Eldon was working. The children and I went down to just "see" if water would flow. Well.......3 hours later we were all muddy but having a blast digging ditches and whatnot. The garden was almost to flat for it to flow well but we did get mass amounts of water certain places. Eldon came the next day and dug some deep trenches along the corn and sunflowers and that worked fantastic.

     A month later a friend that works at Runnings texted and said that they finally got soaker hoses in and he had 4 in the back for us. I jumped into the truck right away and went after them. We had enough then to not move them for half the garden and it worked great. We did still trench water the corn and sunflowers and use a sprinkler on the potatoes but it was nice to have a system figured out.

Veggies in mid July. Our onions did fantastic ( I only had 2 pounds of onion sets). It's safe to say that I had no idea how many that would grow, lol.

Storm damage.

     Towards the end of July it felt like we were finally getting a sustainable amount of veggies. The beans were just starting good as well as the squash and zucchini. One afternoon we were at the house in town (8 miles south of the ranch) and saw a thunderstorm coming through. We purposely waited until it was past on the radar to go home but only got sprinkles in town so I wasn't even worried. As it turns out, the ranch had 2 inches of rain, 20 minutes of hail and very strong winds. I was so thankful not to have been home because I'm sure the camper was rocking. It was a while before I was brave enough to even look at the garden and it did look bad. 

Many of the squash and tomato blossoms were knocked off.

All the plants were horribly beat up and blown around - depressing to say the least!

     We waited 2 days then Makayla and I went down and cut off piles of the severely damaged leaves and stalks. I had read mixed reviews about that online. Some places said to just let them and others said prune them so that the plant will go back to growing vegetables instead of healing. Since it was so late in the growing season, we thought this was our best chance. The corn tried to stand back up but we helped with some rope and also trenching along the roots. It was amazing to see how it perked back up after that!

My birthday gift! All that compost made for some lovely dirt but it also brought weed seeds like crazy so this saved me hours and hours of weeding between the rows.

Finally getting a few red tomatoes the first of August.

Mid August was the best it ever was. After that grasshoppers came in swarms. We did multiple things to combat it but to some extent there was nothing to do.

Tomatoes, marigolds, and peppers

Makayla took charge of these and they did so well!

Interestingly enough, the plants next to them had almost no grasshoppers BUT they did eat the marigolds so I'm not sure if it it actually helped keep insects away or not?!

Our sunflowers waited SO long to bloom but they were gorgeous when they did!

The 3 Kings :).

The bees just swarmed to them.

By September we were cleaning out the garden big time. It was sad but definitely time. 

Our tallest guy was almost 11 feet!

Headed to the camper with all the sunflowers. I was so extremely thankful for the tractor. Much easier then using the truck or carrying it all up in buckets like last year.

Onions laying out to dry. I had so many that we just kept planting as I found room. The last ones were fairly small but I just froze them whole and they are perfect for dropping into roast or soup.

We had to pick a ton of stuff before it was ready, thanks to freezing nights. It was great to be able to take it to the house and lay it out to ripen.

Potatoes and onions

We had a huge amount of tomatoes that we picked green so I just put them in bags in the freezer as they ripened. A few weeks ago we pulled them all out to make sauce and much to my shock, there was over 10 gallons!

Not garden produce but we canned homemade coffee creamer. It's amazing! 

Then our grocery store had apples on sale for $33 a bushel but we did the math and it's still cheaper than buying applesauce so we got 3 bushels.

     The same week apples were on sale, the store was giving a pumpkin to each child that came in. Typical of my children, Makayla picked a perfectly proportioned one, Michael the biggest one in the bin, Emily a tiny, cute one, and Ethan the hardest one to fish out of the bin 😂. So we let them carve around on them before we roasted the seeds and cooked and canned the pumpkins.

The children chopped and peeled so much for me this year! I'm so thankful for all their help.

      For some reason I have no pictures of all the stuff we canned or the horrific messes we made in the kitchen. But I want to list it all, for my own reference more then anything.

Applesauce - 18 quarts (froze 3 gallons for apple butter and 8 quarts)

Apple juice - 3 gallons (just the excess juice from cooking apples. Froze it)

Spiced pickled apples - 8 quarts (actually zucchini instead of apples)

Apple pie filling - 13 quarts (zucchini instead of apples)

Apple butter - 10 pints

Green beans - 12 quarts

Corn - 16 quarts

Carrots - 3 quarts, 14 pints canned. 6 quarts shredded and frozen

Hamburger soup - 9 quarts

Pineapple - 13 pints, 7 quarts (shredded zuchini)

Pickled veggies(bread and butter) 23 pints, 14 quarts (many mixed jars but some just mixed in the               canner. We did cucumbers, zucchini, squash, carrots, green beans, and okra.)

Dill pickled veggies - 10 pints

Onions - 3 gallon bags whole onions frozen (small ones)

Peppers - froze 2 gallons (in snack size baggies)

Pepper/onion shredded mix - froze 13 cups

Hot pepper jelly - 18 pints

Pumpkin - 12 quarts (also froze 1 gallon to make pumpkin butter later and 6 pints

Red beets - 8 pints (just cooked) + 7 quarts pickled

Strawberries - 15 quarts in freezer (99 cent a lb sale)

Spinach - 8 pints frozen

Squash - 11 pints frozen, 6 quarts canned

Tomato soup - 8 quarts

Tomato Juice - 8 quarts

Pizza sauce - 21 quarts

Zucchini - 4 quarts canned, 4 pints frozen

Potato/Carrot mixture for soup - 14 quarts

Potatoes - approximately 25 gallons stored fresh - canned 7 quarts of baby potatoes and froze 6 quarts of shredded potatoes. 

     This does not account for the huge amounts we ate or gave away. Now that's it's all in one place, I'm even more impressed with our garden! Our grocery bill has shrunk considerably since last year this time. But if I were to take all the expenses out, who knows if it would balance or not :).