PoCo Gardens

Some of our tomatoes are blushing and we are beginning to harvest more than we can eat daily.  In a week or two, we will need to begin canning the tomatoes in order to use the mountain of tomatoes we will soon be taking off the vine.  This is also the time of year when all we're going to plant for harvest before the first fall frost must be in the ground.  An exciting time indeed. Red and Yellow Blessings. The sun sugar tomatoes are tiny, orange-colored super-sweet tomatoes when ripe.  They are viny and grow in grape-like clusters.  We don't can them, of course. They are too small.  Rather, we eat them as fast as we can pick them, atop pesto, on a bruschetta, any way we can think of.   The last of the enormous yellow onions for the year have been plucked from the soil and, with them, some of the curing garlic snoozes before the whirring fan in the garage. The spring carrots are harvested and the fall seedlings begin to tickle through the mulc

By Ed Peterson Just harvested:  Red and yellow onions.  Beauties! The Journey Begins We started in March, planting onion sets of 2 sorts, red and yellow.  Onion sets are simply small dry onions, like a scallion or green onion almost, that can be transplanted and grown easily without having to seed indoors.  We have seeded onions indoors with good success, but this year we ordered sets with another gardener and split them up between us for planting.   The exact type I cannot recall, apologies.  I'll get better at documenting all the specifics as we continue.   Onions are one of the first things we plant and they can be planted as early as the first or second week of March in our zone, which is zone 5, in the Chicago-land area, where the average last frost is around April 20th.   Planting Planting the sets is simple; just push the bulb end of the onion into damp soil until just the top is showing, and the onion will grow.  We do this in raised beds with loose so

Some Hardneck Garlic Harvested 07/15/2019 Why Grow Garlic? Today we'll discuss growing and harvesting hardneck garlic from our garden.  We grow garlic for many reasons, the foremost of which is that it is delicious and versatile.  We use it raw in hummus and pesto, roasted with root vegetables, and of course as an aromatic for sauces, soups, and many other things.  In addition, the medicinal, healing qualities of garlic are well documented and understood on a basic level by most.  For those looking for more information about the nutritive and medicinal qualities of garlic, you can read some of the articles linked here:  https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/11-proven-health-benefits-of-garlic https://www.healwithfood.org/medicinal-uses/garlic-healing-properties.php http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=60 Or simply google search like I did. Growing the garlic oneself allows control over what is done or not done to the garlic while it is growing, a

Shell Peas Welcome to PoCo Gardens and to the first of many blog posts to come.  What follows is a short history of how we grew to be what we are, avid growers. My wife Cari and I began with a simple idea: we wanted to eat only the best food and in doing so improve our health and expand our happiness.  This meant eating the freshest vegetables grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, or other harmful agents which could compromise our health.  We wanted the tastiest, most nutritious and enriching vegetables we could cultivate.  Like many, we have, over the years, grown distrustful of the giant food corporations and disenfranchised with an increasingly broken healthcare system, and thus committed to taking control of our food production and by extension our health. The best way to do that, we surmised, was to grow our own food using our small city yard which, like most, was a plot of grass.  Cari had only casually and occasionally grown herbs and flowers, and