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A bit over a month ago, I ran down what we had done in our garden to improve our self sufficiency.  Seems it’s about time for an update, now that everything has been growing a while.

Updates

The squash plants, crookneck and zucchini, are going great.  There are lots of blooms – hopefully, they’ll turn into lots of produce.  The lettuce is growing well, too.  We’re starting to harvest enough lettuce at one time to fill out a meal, leaving the rest to mature a bit more.

I managed to kill the tomato plants.  We were very careful to start them indoors, but then I proceeded to transplant seedlings that were too young and fragile on the hottest day of the year.  Lesson learned.

Carrots are coming up well.  We’re looking forward to when we can harvest them.  The greens aren’t more than about 6 inches long yet, so we have a while to go.

Something is eating the leaves on the broccoli and beans a bit…I’m not sure yet what it is.  I’ll have to do a little recon and then figure out what I can treat them with.

Plans

I don’t plan to have an in-ground garden that’s any bigger than what we have right now next year.  I expect to move most of our production into a greenhouse so I can keep producing all year long.  I’m designing the greenhouse that I want to build over the fall and early winter so I’m ready to stock it up when it’s finished.  I’m working on using as much reclaimed material as I can, and looking into the possibilities of geothermal heating/cooling and solar power so the greenhouse doesn’t increase our electric bill.  The biggest difference in the greenhouse will be the lack of soil-based plant production.  I experimented at our last house with aquaponic gardening, and am excited to do it again on a larger scale.  We’ll talk more about the hows and whys of aquaponics as we make more progress.