Tag Archives: gardening in the Black Hills

In the Garden | What I’m Most Excited to Grow

Posted on by under Agriculture and Ranching, country life, gardening

So here’s the thing. I love to garden, but I can’t say I really enjoy babying temperamental and finnicky plants. It is hard enough to grow anything in the Black Hills without having to contend with plants that just want to die. There are some things that just aren’t worth it to me.

So when it comes to planning my garden and picking what to grow, the things I enjoy growing are the things that will do best without me helicopter-mom-ing them. Because the problem with helicopter-mom-ing a garden is that no matter my best efforts, the hail still might wipe it out. Or the grasshoppers might. Or a very late or very early frost. Or, or, or. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy cultivating or the challenge, but if I have to sweet talk a plant into living, then it just won’t do well in my garden.

Also, I really (really, really) don’t want to give something space in my garden (space is a commodity) and only end up with one of something. Unless it is a really big something. So whatever I grow has to be a good producer. Part of the reason I garden (a large part of it) IS self-sufficiency and seeing the grocery bill dwindle to next to nothing during the summer months, and feeling the satisfaction of meals cooked almost entirely from food grown by us.

That’s why zucchini is one of my favorite things to grow. For real. Those weeds of plants can be totally wiped out by the hail and it will STILL come back and produce massive squash before the end of the season. And really, I do love growing zucchini. If you hate zucchini, don’t grow it, but it is incredibly versatile and such a great addition to salsa, sauces, soups, is a delicious snack dried, and I love it lightly sauteed or grilled, or even cubed and put into salads and pasta salads. And those massive zucchinis that get found in the late summer? They keep almost as well as winter squash, and are excellent grated and put into something, or even selectively sliced or diced and sauteed. Not quite as delicious as the smaller, tenderer zucchinis, but it is a widespread misconception that large zucchinis are inedibly woody and good only for zucchini bread. This poor veg gets a bad rap, probably because people in general lack the imagination to prepare it more than one way, but it is arguably the most versatile thing a person can grow in the garden, and one of the easiest. Consider it the gateway vegetable.

Hubbard squash is another favorite of mine. I grew it two summers ago (last year the hail wiped it out), and ended up with easily probably 100-150 pounds of great-keeping squash that we slowly worked on over the winter. Hubbards can get up to 40 pounds–The biggest I harvested was about 25 pounds. It can be used like a butternut or even a pumpkin, with bright orange, mellow flesh that bakes incredibly well. I loved to roast it and spice it up with some savory seasonings, and we’d eat it like mashed potatoes.

Basil is an herb I’m particularly fond of growing. It is very prolific, pretty disease resistant in my experience, and it is so easy to preserve it by chopping it finely with a food processer with some oil and freezing in ice cubes. The flavor is incredible.

As far as tomatoes go, Amish paste tomatoes are one of my favorites. They are great producers, especially in my greenhouse using strip-pruning to encourage fruiting, the texture is great, and they are so versatile. Big enough to slice for sandwiches, but fleshy enough for salsas or just eating straight off the vine, these have quickly become my go-to tomato.

Chard, cress, arugula, and lettuce blends are also incredibly easy to grow, and once you’ve tasted a fresh-picked salad with spicy cress and arugula, a few sprigs of fresh dill, and a variety of lettuces, it is just hard to go back.

Some new things I’m excited to try are some different pumpkin varieties, including “Jarrahdale”, as well as “Fairytale” and “Rouge Vif d’Etampes”, for some color. These will all get planted at the edge of the garden so they can sprawl without having to corral them. I’m already looking hopefully forward to some fall decorating with a rainbow of pumpkins! I stumbled across a squash called a scallop squash, and decided to try those as well. Fortunately there are as many ways to eat squashes as there are squashes.

Radishes are another vegetable that will be a new addition this year–I discovered how delicious radishes are sauteed! They’ll be the kind of thing I can stick in here and there wherever there is a little space in the garden. A friend came by a bunch of extra seeds and passed a bunch to me, including a few different radish varieties.

And, because I’m a sweet little wife, I will be giving watermelons another try. I have a failed record at growing watermelons, but that and cherry tomatoes are basically the only things he specifically requests that I plant. And so I plant. And hope for better luck with my watermelons this year. Any tips would be gladly appreciated.

What are you growing this year?

In the Garden | March Garden Prep

Posted on by under country life, gardening, the homestead

How in the world is it March already? Spring is just around the corner. As bittersweet as it is in the fall to put the garden to bed, there really only ends up being a couple of months before the feed stores are stocking their seeds, seed catalogs get eagerly leafed through, leftover seeds are sorted and organized, new seeds are purchased, and all the plans get made to make this coming garden season the best one yet. It really is fun. And it is hard to beat leafing through the seed catalogs on a wintery, blustery day!

Based on last year’s experiment (really, every year is its own experiment), I’ll focus on my salsa garden, cucumbers, and winter squashes. My salsa garden was a bit of a bust last year due to grasshoppers, the heat, and the fact that my husband unknowingly sprayed my tomato bed with Milestone three years ago. Needless to say, I’ll be planting tomatoes somewhere else and getting a jump start on them with some early planting indoors. Mortgage Lifter, Black Krim, and Romas will be the key features! I’m planning on growing them all in pots in my hoop house, to extend our growing season a bit.

I already got a start on peppers, which take awhile to germinate. Anaheim, poblano, Hungarian wax peppers, and bell peppers are all sown in paper pots and sitting on heat mats in the bathroom. There’s a good chance these will also be pot-grown in the hoop house. Somehow I forgot about jalapenos, so those will be added at a future date!

We acquired some old railroad ties from a horse corral my grandpa built 40 years ago, and have those slated for a few projects, including raised beds for flowers. As we have decent weather to work outdoors, the raised beds will get built and be ready to go for spring planting. Zinnias and cosmos as well as sunflowers will be some of the cutting flowers – it should be beautiful.

On warm days when the soil is soft, I’ll be continuing to prep my garden beds, cleaning out last year’s old plants, turning the soil, wetting it down, and eventually covering the beds with plastic to help kill off weed seeds and further break down the compost I’ve already churned in. The root veggies – carrots, beets, and turnips – will need good, soft soil to grow in, so working the soil ahead of time will help.

Even though we’re a ways from planting outdoors, there is a lot that can be done to beat those winter blues and keep spring coming! If you have any new varieties of veggie you’re excited to try, share in the comments!

In the Garden | Winter Sowing

Posted on by under country life, gardening, the homestead

I am so excited to be trying something new! A random Facebook group popped up last week called “Winter Sowers” and after reading a bit about this method of seed starting, I decided I had to give it a try!

It is a common sense method of early (early early!) seed starting that utilizes the natural freeze-thaw cycles to germinate seeds. Essentially, plant seeds in closed containers, creating what amounts to mini greenhouses, in the middle of winter and the seeds will germinate when they are ready. Especially considering how many perennials can be sown in the fall and will germinate in the spring, this method makes a lot of sense. If all goes well, and from what I can tell people have a lot of success with this method, you have exceptionally hardy young plants to eventually transplant to your garden. Why have I never heard of this before? In western South Dakota, we have a short growing season (we’ve been known to have frosts as late as June and as early as August), and very changeable weather, so anything I can do to jump start my gardening is a plus!

So far I have started a number of perennials – lavender, coreopsis, lupine, some wildflower mixes, coneflowers, black eyed Susans – and some greens and veggies – asparagus, kale, spring onions, spinach, arugula, and chives. I planted in a variety of containers and will take notes, containers ranging from Ziploc bags with holes cut in the bottoms, paper pots, old lettuce containers, and seed pots leftover from greenhouse plants last year. After a kerfuffle with the animals, the winter-sown seeds are safely inside the woven-wire fences we put around our trees. I may start others as I accumulate more containers (and inevitably accumulate more seeds).

Check out the Winter Sowers Facebook page if you want details and extensive how-tos! I’m excited to see how this goes!