A garden tended
Is a life being rebuilt
With hope now restored

There are plenty of fruit set and the plants are doing well! Time to start looking for recopies!

Hello everyone! It has been a long time since I have done an update. Between gardening and camping I have not been in front of the computer that much except for work!

Sugar beets are doing super well! I am quite happy as this is the first year I have tried growing them and I am hopeful that I can make some of my own sugar this year!

Cucumbers are also producing and have been adding them to my "daily five"!

It rained for a good part of the day here so was not able to get much planting done. Although the "purple bean" garden is ready to be planted (two rows of bales just line the peas) and I was able to get soaker hoses over all the bales. However, I was really excited to see the first pea emerge!

This is the second year with this garden and while it produced an okay crop I wanted to take the extra time to improve the soil! This is a long and narrow garden! My plan this year is to plant grain sorghum (for making gluten free flour), chick peas (also for making gluten free flour), sun flowers, and sugar beets (I thought it would be fun to try to make my own sugar).

Above is what it looked like before I started.

The town I live in has a compost pile so I made two trips!

A challenge with planting in bales, you do not want to plant your seeds or plants until the conditioning process is done! If you plant too early and the bale heats back up then your plants will almost certainly die. Keeping them damp is key. If they dry out then the decomposition process stops and starts again once they get wet again. Using a compost thermometer is a good way to monitor their temperature and you do not want to plant until the bales are consistently below 80 degrees F. However, another way to know, without the use of a thermometer is to wait until mushrooms grows.

The peas are finally planted in the bales! In earlier articles I covered the steps to conditioning the bales but now that they are ready planting has commenced!

Peas are one of the first crops I plant with potatoes being first. Both are cooler weather plants and both are somewhat frost tolerant.

Peas need something to crawl up and I use what I have on hand from a prior life, t-posts and cattle panels. Wanting to save myself some work I have a rows of bales right next to each other, that way I can have one panel that the plants can grow up from either side.

In three of my gardens I use a Native American technique known as the three sisters. It was a form of companion gardening and crop rotation where corn, squash, and beans are planted together. The beans add nitrogen to the soil while the corn and pumpkins use nitrogen. The idea is to use pole beans which will use the corn plant as a pole, the beans can also help anchor the corn down! The pumpkins grow and their leaves form a natural mulch that both shades out weeds and the ground from the hot sun thereby helping with soil retention.

I was hoping to actually plant peas today but mother nature sent us some rain. Not going to complain as the ground was getting a bit dry. However, I was able to get the panels up for the peas to climb! That is definitely the most labor intensive part of the project!

Today's project was to get Garden #1 cleaned up (it was a bale garden last year) and tilled. So I gathered up what was left of last years bales and put them on the pile (added some nitrogen) so they could compost for a couple of weeks and then went a head and got them tilled. I will post later what a "Three Sisters Garden" means but this will be the garden that I plant my pop corn, "big" pumpkins, and beans in!

In 2017 the neighbor cut down a grove of trees to make room for a new garage, the company he hired to do the job ran all the trees through a chipping machine. Since I can never seem to get my hands on enough organic material I walked over and asked if they would mind dumping some on my land. They asked me how much I wanted and I told them as much as I could get my grubby little hands on! It was somewhat humorous (at least I thought it was) that they would ask after every five loads or so if I was still okay with them bringing more and I assured them that I was quite happy!

Bales are laid out, soaker hoses in place, nitrogen applied, and heavy mulching between the bales done! I will be posting photos of the entire project at a later time. Next steps is to water daily, adding more fertilizer, and putting up wire panels for the beans, peas, and other vine plants to grow on!

Who is up for a following directions game! A fun game to play while you are stuck at home and you can't start your garden yet!

I promise it is fun!

Please read these instructions in their entirety before starting!

To all the educators out there rushing to get content online. I have some experience with this and can tell you that the first couple weeks are the hardest. You are not failing! You are learning and you are guiding both parents and children through this process. Keep up the good work!

As the sap continues to boil down it will turn more and more brown and become sweet! I enjoy taste testing it! There are two ways to determine when you are done, the first is when the temperature is 220 F and the second is with the use of a hydrometer (which is far more accurate). Keep in mind that when syrup is hot it is going to seem thinner than what it is once it cools down!

I plan to post the actual finishing process tomorrow but just had to share!

As I mentioned in my Pails of Sap post sap has a sugar concentration of about 2% and before it can be syrup the concentration should be 66%. That is achieved by removing the water and you remove the water by boiling the sap! It takes approximately 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of water. It definitely is a time intensive process that takes a lot of patience!

Early in the season I often boil in the house just a couple words of caution

In roughly 24 hours we were able to gather 12 gallons of sap! Not the high flow for a single day but certainly nothing to complain about!

Sap begins to flow as soon as temperatures fluctuate above and below the freezing point. Typically this means day time temps are above freezing and night time temps are below freezing as days tend to be warmer than nights. However, if you have a really cold day where it is below freezing followed by a warm night, where it is above freezing, sap will flow!

While it may not be "gardening" it has become a yearly tradition to harvest our own maple sap!

This year three trees are tapped and each tree has three taps!

I do not have a fancy system where tubes run to a sugar sap but I was able to get my hands onto some four gallons, food grade, pails complete with covers that already had holes drilled in them. Very handy for being able to collect sap and not have all kinds of debris land in them!

Is important to check daily since I have had them fill up in a 24 hour time period!