The Gardens
Organic vegetables
We love growing vegetables using organic methods that we learned while farming in Kauai, HI. Even though Vermont has a far shorter growing season we are still able to produce a wide variety of vegetables. On the Farm Stand in their season we sell asparagus, peas, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, tomatillos, greens (such as rainbow chard, collard greens, pak choi, kale, lettuce, etc), herbs, pumpkins, squash, carrots, beets. We also use the vegetables in our baking such as Parsnip Bread, Pumpkin Turmeric Tea Cake and Lemon Ginger Zucchini Bread.
Seasonal Fruits
We have a number of fruit trees (apples, crabapples, pears, cherries, peaches and plumbs) and many fruit bushes (red currants, black currants, raspberries (red, black and golden), gooseberries, yaz berries, blackberries, strawberries and blueberries. We also have a big rhubarb patch!
We use our fruits in seasonal jams and seasonal baked goods like the pocket pies, rhubarb loaf cake etc.
How it started
When we started our gardens there were only 4 vegetable beds in the field and so we gradually built up the number of beds by hand (just shovels! no tractor/no tiller etc). We then fenced the beds so that our precious vegetables wouldn’t get munched by deer and then went about the process of removing all the grass around the beds and replacing them with wood chips (after a few close calls with mowers and wheedwhackers endangering the crops)
Once our top garden was completed (pictured) we moved our focus down to the lower field to start another. For the second garden we started by pasturing our chickens on the site, letting them scratch up and fertilize the ground before (once again by hand) digging over the whole section and planting a cover crop field designed to enrich the soil (and in the case of the tilling radish, to naturally aerate the soil). The next year we marked out beds and filled the aisles with woodchips.