Beet Pickles

Every time Michael goes to a salad bar he gets pickled beets! So, we harvested our beets and I made him some!

Beets grow in South Carolina!

Growing Beets (and carrots) in the south is something I have not ever tried. Having clay soil, we don't have the proper drainage and then we have the heat to deal with. It stays too hot too soon in the spring and stays too hot in the fall.

But with Sveta here and loving to use beets in several dishes like borscht, last fall I tried to grow some. They didn't do too much but wintered over and kept growing. I also started some in February outside this spring to see what they could do. Here are my results!

I'm excited that they are bigger than an inch! In fact, some are quite large. We had a wonderful sweet and sour beets dish with dinner. (I'm also pretty tickled about how the carrots are doing as well!)

Project finished!

Michael and I have worked for the past month redoing our beds in the upper garden and heavily mulch the rows to hopefully finish eradicated the Bermuda grass that has plagued our new upper garden.

It sure looks good to see it done. Can you believe we picked our first ripe strawberry on April 5th! They are loaded with berries so we can't wait for the season to come. We covered our last area with black plastic and will probably store some mulch on it until we are ready to finish up that part of the garden and hopefully can start without the grass.

I also started several different herbs in my quest to learn more about using herbs in cooking and medicinal needs.

I have them in pots on our deck so they are close to the kitchen. Boy, I love the smell of fresh Basil!

Spring is here and the garden is growing!

Spring is here! We are establishing an asparagus bed and have had one meal so far! It is so good to cut it and bring it into the house, cook it and eat it!

With the warm winter and early spring, we set things out much earlier than normal. Here's a bed of cabbage that is growing phenomenal.

Our upper garden has all of our early plants and they are growing fast and look so dark green. Our new strawberry plants have come to life and are blooming.

We set out broccoli out the first of March and as of last week started eating it! They have dark green wonderful heads.

On Monday, we planted two beds of our tomatoes. I started several varieties of heirloom. These varieties are Watermelon tomatoes, Cindy's West Virginia, Arkansas Traveler and Beefy boy.

I started the tomato seeds the first of February. After they got to a certain point, I put them in the tubes to get nutrients. These are some Cherokee Purple tomatoes that we are going to put in one more bed. I actually saved these seeds from last summer! I wasn't sure how they would do so I planted a lot of them and they all came up! I hope to do more seed saving this year.

Peppers can actually be perennials and so last August we dug this pepper plant up and put it in a pot to winter over in the greenhouse. We had a big batch of banana peppers in November and it has begun to bloom and set more peppers!

The first of March I decided to try to have early squash since it was so mild. So we started these in pots and they are about to bloom. I'm not sure how good they will do in pots but who knows, maybe we will have squash in April!