Project Garden Noob - Year 6

As Spring approaches, I've been toying with garden ideas for our new home.  If you recall, we have this weird "garden" around our A/C that I wanted to utilize somehow, but it seems dirty to plant vegetables in the ground around an A/C unit. Space last summer:   Ick.  No thank you.  We removed all the plants and awful split rail fence. So I started casually looking for some raised beds like this bad boy here: This bed , from Amazon.com, runs $180.  I asked my husband if he thought we could build it for cheaper, not thinking too much of it at the time.  Until I came home from a girl's day out to this: Obviously this is horrible lighting and it's not quite finished, but you get the idea. Then he built another larger, deeper bed for tomatoes:   So right now, the larger bed is in place, and the smaller bed is waiting to be leveled in, but those pesky strawberry plants are in the way.... View from front (p...

My goal with gardening has always been to eat what we grow. Shocking, I know.  Part of that was always meant to be long-term food storage.  Freezing carrots and tomatoes was as far as I ever got and they typically died in their frozen coffin. Who remembers to pull out frozen tomatoes when you have a can right there? This year, I have started to make moves in this department.  For one, I received a food dehydrator from my in-laws this Christmas.  I have dehydrated everything I can get my hands on, including: Apple Bananas Celery Mushrooms Herbs Pineapple  Pears Beets I tried some fruit leather type thing, but it had peanut butter in it and just came out off putting for some reason.   I also tried my hand at beef jerky, both classic and teriyaki; I thought they came out pretty well. I have also checked out some books at the local library to read up on canning, specifically tomatoes and other vegetables.  First, I  want to en...

This past Christmas I was lucky enough to finally get into some long overdue garden-related reading, it is winter after all.  My dear friend Bethany gave me From the Ground Up:  A Food Grower's Education in Life, Love, and the Movement That's Changing the Nation eons ago and I finally got around to reading it .    I really enjoyed how this book flowed, it was mainly about how the author's disillusionment with modern life lead her to living and working on an organic farming commune.  After seventeen years, she returned to the modern life she shunned, where she helped foster the urban farming movement in suburban Chicago.  I found its equal parts autobiography and urban farming activism enjoyable and just what I needed to get a new garden started in our new home. As reading From the Ground Up reignited my passion for gardening and starting some semblance of a garden in our new home, my husband declared that if I'm going to start gardeni...