Monday, November 10, 2008

Getting started

My wife has been blogging for quite some time, but I now think that I will start my own blog for a number of reasons. I want to start keeping a journal and If I put some of my goals and achievements down for all to see it will stay motivated to get them all done.

The basic reason that I want to start this blog is to show some of the success that my family and I have had with home gardening and canning. We do not have much space, and don't even own our own home. What we do have is allot of motivation to change the way we eat and how that food is obtained. I am worried about the state of the country and how dependent we are on a few large farms to provide all of the food for the entire nation. I know it is not as simple as that, but I do know that on only a small plot of ground in our backyard we have been able to put up close to 30 dozen jars of food from the 2008 season and now have a nice fall garden in the ground.

I want this blog to be an outlet for me to express some of the current things I am working on, what I want to do in the future and how I am going to get there. To start the blog off right I will give you a picture of what the garden looks like now and a sample list of what we canned this year.





These are some of the pumpkins that we grew. We had about 20 or so, most were canned, but we did save two for Halloween.

Pumpkin in the jars. I will admit that my wife did most of the work with canning the pumpkin, and what a wonderful job she does.


This is my son Ben and I working to get the ground ready for the fall garden. After taking up all of the summer crops I put a pickup load of composted cow manure in it with the tiller.



This was taken a few days ago and shows the garden with lots of leafy greens growing very will. We have peas, red and regular cabbage, collards, brussel sprouts, beats, cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce and spinach. The winters are very mild in the central San Joaquin valley and these should all last the winter if I get my mulch down soon. I have two bales of straw I will put down just as soon as I get enough news paper to put under it.


6 comments:

Mimi Nowland said...

I am so glad that you will have an outlet. Now we each have our own blog.

C.D. Weber said...

I see, this is a competition to see which family can have the most blogs...well, you're on! Just as soon as I can think of a name for my soon-to-be blog. I will accept any ideas so we can beat you...I'm still waiting for those good ideas so I can get some posts up. Just kidding guys, although I do want to get something up now.
Chris

Webers said...

Come on J-Rod. Just because you're out of town working doesn't mean you can leave us hanging. November is National Blog month (or so I've been told) now, chop chop.
Looks good, can't wait to read more.

Joyful Noise said...

Beautiful garden, can't wait to eat some of the produce! Isn't California weather wonderful?

Angela Worth said...

Wow!! I am so jealous. I want a garden but have no idea what I am doing. I wish you lived nearby so you could give me some pointers. Your garden looks amazing and I know you are getting a lot of production.

Me said...

I'm jealous! I used to garden and can a lot but since going back to work full-time 10 years ago, that has all gone by the wayside. I really want to get back to that, however, even if it's just container gardening. I feel as you do that we need to be self-sufficient. I also want to grow organic with non-sterile seeds. It scares me to think that one day not to far away, all seeds will be controlled this way by one or two companies (I've read things on this...can't remember where). Anyway, good luck to you and your family. Any pointers anyone has on little-time-little-space gardening would be wonderful!