Growing Your Own Food - Let The Journey Begin

Looks like with every passing day we're getting closer and closer to the new gardening season. Each year there's a reflection period, that comes after the season ends. You need to go through what's happened and analyze what went wrong, why and what can you do to make things happen. If there have been mistakes, you need to find a way to avoid repeating them.

In our case, we've had to rethink what we're going to grow this year, drop the one that are not suitable for our garden and try to grow some new ones.

Purple And Green Cauliflower

One of the new entries this year is the colorful cauliflower, in this case Sicily purple and Macerata green. Italy have a large variety of cauliflower and these two are their sort.

Sowing time would be later for both, March for the purple and April for the green, but my dad's middle name is not patience, so he already sow the seeds today.

This is a macro photo of the seeds, you can see how tiny they are.

Another macro photo, in which the seed look like stones :) Anyway, the bed for them has been made, we're hoping to get some healthy seedlings, which can then grow nicely. We've never had these colorful cauliflowers and can't wait to taste them. Supermarkets, grocery stored don't sell them either, so there's a chance we won't get anything out of them, but we have nothing to lose, have to try it.

Red beet can't be missing, we are growing it every year to make fresh and canned pickles. There are many types, we only grow these two, long and round.

One of the advantages of making your own pickles is that you can make it as you want, adding the spices you want. Not to mention you have your own organic beet roots. When it comes to pickles, I have tow favorites, one of it is cucumbers, the other is beet roots.

Garlic can also never be missing from the garden. We are using a lot in cooking and it comes in handy to have your own, for free. The problem is what you get in the grocery store is coming from China (no thanks) and what you can buy at the farmers market is very expensive.

These seem to be good as the cloves are big and some are starting to grow already (see the green part). This will help grow faster. There's still one month to go, till then the others may grow as well, giving us an advantage.

We already have some sowed last October. We've never done that, this will be our first year and I'm hoping to get some green onions as soon as possible. Fingers crossed as the conditions were ideal. We've had snow, rain, cold, everything these need to grow in the spring.

Last but not least, onion cloves or sets, I don't know which one is the proper definition. 1/3 of the garden is always allocated to onion and garlic. What you see on the photo is 3kg of of onion cloves. It's a lot of work sowing these, but last year we've tried a new method, using a tube that spares you from a lot of work. It's working perfectly, so in an hour or two this should be done, then the rest depends on mother nature.

One thing I'd like to grow this year and that's sunflower. It would be just for fun, for decoration purpose as there's no other use of it. I need to buy some seeds, but it's still too early.

So as you can see, the process has started, some of the seedlings are growing nicely already. Now the ball is in mother nature's court, let's see if the very warm winter we had in December is going to backfire or not. Sometimes we get snow in March, or beginning of April, which is not usual and it delays everything.