I try to grow fresh vegetables and fruit on my little two acre plot.  My husband would love to be self sufficient enough to live off the land.  I’m not so ambitious.  I just want to grow some stuff and I’ll supplement what we can’t.  Here’s the deal though.  Don’t limit yourself to doing only what you have tried before.  Try something new.

We had a party recently and some people wanted to see what we are growing.  I showed them and I apologized because my garden has some weeds and is a little messy.  I was kind of embarrassed, but they were impressed.  We have tried growing things that they had not seen in a regular garden.  Some of it was not too far fetched.  One guy thought the dill was asparagus.  I did have asparagus, but not right there.  We also had Kale and Chard, those were new for us this year.

We grow tomatillos, and have grown them for many years, but we haven’t met another person who grows them.  A couple of years after we started growing tomatillos they showed up in the stores - at a hefty price.  You wouldn’t believe how easy they are to grow and how vigorous and prolific those plants are.  If you like green salsa - grow tomatillos. They even do really well in pots.

When we were walking around, they saw the composter and the one friend was interested, and then he turned to me and asked, if I  still had rain barrels.  I said yes.  He said his wife was blown away the first time she came to the house and saw we had rain barrels.  Hey, I had them before Ed Begley Jr. We got them about 14 years ago.  I told him that my family grew up in the city, composting and recycling way back in the 70s, but I had the only rain barrels of the family.  I told him that we water our plants with buckets of rainwater when they’re full.

We try new things with our garden and our kitchen.  We discard the ones that don’t work out (Kale so taken over by cabbage worms got tossed this year and the Cauliflower just didn’t look nice), but when it works out, we’ll do it again and again.  Two years ago I grew yellow squash.  It worked out so well, I’ve done it every year since. My garden is an extension of my kitchen.  When I grow something new, then I have a new ingredient to work with, being a better gardener, makes me a better cook.

I have my own herb garden, that I started years ago.  Some years it looked really, really good and other years it went to heck and looked horrendous.  It all depended on how much time I had available to work in and around the garden.  Big vacation years, or when my kids were young and needed a lot of watching in the pool were the bad years.  My kids are older teens and I now have a lot more time to spend in the garden, plus sometimes they help out.  Raised beds make it easier to grow and control my herbs and keep the weeds and grass at bay.

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