Hi gardeners! After yet another 6-day work week and 2 more to go (hopefully) I'm facing the reality that my garden is going to be limited at best this year.
What brought home the reality finally, is that our refrigerator died this week. We lost a lot, but not everything - thankfully, not our whole pork/ lamb, soups, sauces and veggies that were all in the big freezer, or our picked/canned veggies, plus most of the cheese could be saved. At least we could compost most of what we lost, and the spoiled poultry we threw in the woods to let the scavenger wildlife have at it.
Our one day off was taken up by shopping for a new refrigerator, which won't be available for two weeks, so we bought a mini-fridge just to get us through and store a few days of meals. No point in growing things we won't be able to keep fresh.
So, I'm following Acre4Me's advice, to use this year to improve my soil by planting cover crops. My order of 2# buckwheat seed and 5# winter wheat seed just arrived, so the plan is to only plant a small section of cabbage and basil for fermented canned sauerkraut and frozen pesto, and sow the other 3/4 of the garden in buckwheat, to be tilled under in July. Sow another crop, till it under in September, then sow winter wheat and leave it until next Spring. Looking forward to see how my soil turns out next year.
Just for fun, I did also order some loofah seeds to plant on the trellis, to try something new. A three-month growing season should be OK for our area. And they're apparently not a crop that needs a lot of processing or special storage, you just dry them out and peel off the rinds. I'll let you all know if they turn out successful, as well as how useful they turn out to be for sponge replacements.
Thank you, all of you, for all your good suggestions and ideas.
