Gardeners

[Piggiron]

How many gardeners we got here ?
Plowed and worked my garden up a couple weeks back, but the last 2 days I spread about 8 ton of compost and tilled it in. Planted onions, zucchini, cucumbers, green beans, and tomatoes.
Still have sweet potatoes, a variety of herbs & spices, and spinach to plant.

[Adasha_Machining]

Not much room here but - built a raised 5x16' bed a few years ago. Do a few types of tomatoes, peppers, onions, cucumbers (pickling, my favourite), banana peppers, carrots, beans, peas, and trying brussels sprouts this year. All the stuff we buy all summer anyways. Not a lot of room, so they're all crammed in, so soil has to always be rich.

In the front yard I have landscaped gardens all across the house frontage as well as a satellite garden on the corner (corner lot). We always do flowering gardens, with a couple small ornamental weeping type trees. I far prefer the colours over greenery. I don't like shrubs..
we are yearly the "talk of the neighbourhood". And for nearly a decade now I've been tryyyyyyying to get my lawn to look nice. Our area is plagued by dandelions. And in recent years we've been having a real hard time with Japanese beetles. They are savage and decimate certain types of plants.
I had some nice roses a few years ago, I had to pull them up because they would attract the beetles which would eat and kill everything. They're a menace...

[Piggiron]

I don't have a very big garden...yet.
Tried a new method of seed planting this year. I bought a Planet jr 300a seeder at auction a few years back. This year I modified it adding a 3-point hitch connection for my sub-compact tractor (sorry, no pic's yet), but here a video link that shows the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=sfW74vlitYc

It works okay, but not really adjustable for seed spacing/population.
I did find the planter I want when I get to a bigger garden: https://www.wizardplantersusa.com/shop
Been looking at the D-20 model. Watching a few YouTube videos, I'm beginning to think DIY project for the shop.

[OldCarGuy]

My father grew up on a farm. Even though we live in the city, we had a huge garden. Planting 100 tomato plants, corn, green beans, peas, egg plant, celery, rhubarb, red beets, potatoes, leaf lettuce, broccoli, strawberries, apples, pears, plums, peaches.. Between canning and freezing we had enough to last all year for our family of eight. It was a matter of economics..  We dug out a root cellar and stored 100's of quart jars of produce. Seldom had a use for a can opener... After I left home I carried on the tradition. Sadly this is the first year I did not plant my 50' by 100' garden. My age has caught up with me.

[Piggiron]

My wife loves canning and I love eating it.
She does vacuum, water bath, and pressure canning. She cans butter, sugar, flour, tomatoes, tomato juice, milk, jams, jellies, etc. You name it, she probably cans it.

[Adasha_Machining]

We had so many tomatoes last year I tried cooking tomato soup and sauces for the first time ever, as well as short term/fridge canning.
Immediately sold!
I will be hoping for the same huge amount of tomatoes this year. I loooooove fresh tomatoes in the summer (just a simple tomato on toast) as well as cherry tomatoes. But last year my plants exploded and as a family we just couldn't keep up - I was giving tomatoes away to whomever would take them.

[Piggiron]

  BLT's, BLT's 

[jocat54]

 We have just a really small garden (all I want to take care of these days). Kept it really small with just green beans, tomatoes, squash and cucumbers. Had our first cucumbers with supper tonight. Fresh is so good.
Will be canning green beans soon. Used our last years up already. One of my grandsons can't believe how good canned green beans are--he always wants some when he eats with us.

[TerryWerm]

When I was a youngster my mom would freeze sweet corn. She used to can a few things also, but sweet corn was king. My brother and I would typically go out and pick twenty dozen or so first thing in the morning, usually just after sunrise. We'd get soaking wet from the dew!

We'd get it all up to the house then start in cutting the ends of the cobs off with a hatchet. This made removing the husks and the corn silk much easier and got rid of the small end of the cob which never had any useful kernels on it anyway.

Mom and my sister would start boiling the cobs as soon as we had some cleaned. Once boiled they set the cobs aside to cool, stacking them up on the kitchen counter. 

Once my sister had the boiling under control, mom would start cutting the kernels from the cobs, doing it on a large plastic sheet of some sort that was meant for rolling out dough. She tried different utensils over the years to do the cutting, but always went back to using a nice, sharp kitchen knife, taking about six swipes per cob. The kernels would get removed from the sheet from time to time and put into a number of large bowls.

By this time my brother and I were done with all of the cleaning and had disposed of all of the husks and silk, and we would come in and help with the packaging. We would put corn into clear plastic freezer bags, putting 2 cups into each bag. Finished bags went into the freezer and the cobs got disposed of outside, usually in the meadow nearby. Dad always told us to spread the cobs out and not to leave any piles anywhere. About a month later he would cut and bale the meadow hay and he didn't want to bale up any of the rotten cobs. 

We would have the entire project done by 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Guess what we would have for supper that night?  Corn on the cob?  Noooooo.   After a full day of freezing the stuff more corn was the last thing we wanted!