Our first garden at Soaring Hawk Farm

 

It was a bit of a scramble getting our 2023 garden in because we had quite a lot of prep work to do at our garden site. We had already identified our garden location. We started with an area about 100 feet by 100 feet or 10,000 square feet. The area gets full sun all day for up to 15 hours in late June. It was a portion of one of our pastures. The garden site is west of our house about 80 feet from the house with easy access by tractor, truck or walking. 

A friend and neighbor who has a much larger tractor with plowing and tilling attachments came over and plowed and tilled our garden site. It was a huge help and he has offered to come back and till it again for me as we work this 125 year old pasture into a rock picked fertile garden. I then began picking rock from the lovely soil that is full of large rocks deposited from volcanic eruptions and slow moving glaciers. Needless to say I only de-rocked and prepared about one fourth or 5,000 square feet of garden for this season. I continue to pick rock in the other areas and have plans to expand the garden in future years and eventually plant up to a half acre. The goal is to provide more fresh vegetables to our friends and family and produce enough to give significant contributions to our local food banks.

The garden was planted by May 17, about a week later than normal. We did use more starts than we will in the future, but we were not set up to do our own starts this first year. We plan to grow many of our own starts from seed in the future. We planted 21 different varieties of vegetables and everything grew well. We fertilized twice with organic fertilizer and watered well throughout our warm sunny summer.

We had another amazing summer in the PNW and the garden did very well! Not only did the garden provide us with many fresh vegetables starting in late July into the fall we also started freezing and water bath canning this summer. We have many quarts of pickles, pickled beans, canned tomatoes, canned marina sauce, frozen peas, frozen shredded zucchini and frozen blackberries which grow wild along one of our fence lines. We also have a dozen nice carving pumpkins still on the vine as we move into fall and the Halloween season.

I will also be blogging in the future about our Bee hives. Our dear friend Dr. Jason captured honey bees in a trap set in one of our trees. The bees formed a colony  he moved into a hive that has now split into three hives two on our land. These three bee hives produced nine quarts of delicious honey. Dr. Jason's Soaring Hawk Honey.