Edible South Shore

Many of you may have heard of the Edible magazines.  They're free in many areas and can be a great reference for the local food scene.  Recently, I struck up a conversation online with the publisher of Edible South Shore here in MA.  We had originally started talking about some online help she needed and ended up talking about the blog that went along with their website and magazine.   As a result, I'm now going to be writing for and managing the blog.  I hope you'll check out what I'm writing about there as well.

My first post is about gardening.  It's my passion and the reason that I got into the whole local food movement in the first place.  Edible South Shore blog.

Garden upgrades

I've talked for a bit about raising the beds within the older part of my garden.  My gardening had started with the Square Foot method, and it seems to be the easiest for me to work with.  After years of fighting the weeds in the informal pathways, that wanted to grow into my beds, I decided to bite the bullet.  Last fall, with the help of a friend (the same one who built my new coop), I became the proud owner of 7 new raised beds. 

The new beds are 4x12.  As I was installing them, I realized that all these years, I was shortchanging my garden.  It seemed that what I thought were 4x 12 beds, were in reality quite a bit shorter.  My wonderfully helpful neighbor helped me with some of the digging and lifting.  They were then topped with cow manure. 

 

Over the past several months, I've also topped with some crushed egg shells.  The bed in the far right got the clean out of my chicken coop last fall.  

The fence is being removed, as it is in the way of moving around some of the beds.  All in all, I have just under 700 sq ft of raised beds to plant in.  Considering 100 of that is planted in strawberries, I have 600 or so to plant.  It doesn't sound like much to me, but in reality is quite a bit of space.  I'd still like to add some additional beds, especially one for asparagus, but am just about out of space.  

All of these beds will now have pipe fittings added to make them all capable of being turned into hoops.  The brassicas in the basement are slated for planting in the hoops toward the middle to end of March, if things work out as I'd like.   The tatsoi is already up in the basement nursery, so the season has officially started as far as I'm concerned. 

Updates

Change is something we can always count on.  After much heartache, the farmer's market that I was working on, was closed.  The reasons why are too numerous to list, but we'll chalk it up to poor decisions made before I came on board and lack of community response. 

However, this has opened up time in my life.  As a result, I'll be writing and working for a new (to me) venture in the local food scene.  I'm very excited about it and will tell you all about it shortly.  The result will also be that I will be posting on a more regular basis to this blog as well. 

In gardening news, yesterday was Valentine's Day.  I'm not one for the Hallmark holiday, but I do have one tradition.  That would be starting my peppers and brassicas.  They're all warm and toasty, so I should have shoots soon.  The weather here in New England has been so warm this year, I'm wondering if we'll have an early spring and get a good long season.  I'm itching to go play outside. 

There are lots of wonderful things happening.  Stay tuned!