Food for eating, freezing and Canning
			The Garden in the spring is always lovely. Here, in the back, you can see crops of sugar snap peas on the left and right with multiplier onions and garlic to the center. Green beans are doing well in the front right.
Close up of how multiplier onions grow.	Lettuce grows nicely by the raised bed of onions. The raised bed keeps the lettuce roots cool.			Strawberries grew in the lower terraced gardens and produced many sweet berries for jams, margaritas and all around good eating.		Close up of sugar snap peas before blossoming.
	This particular year we harvested approximately 6,500 multiplier onions! All our friends and neighbors thought we were very generous.					Bob designed these racks made of wood and chicken wire to hold the onions while they dried. The racks allowed for air circulation. Cured and kept in a cool dry place the onions will keep until the following spring.
	Don’t even try to pull up the garlic and onions without a fork.
Stay tuned for an update with some more Fore Technology for drying and storing onions and garlic till the next season. We have been successful keeping them from May harvest until the almost the next May harvest. Detailed instructions from Bob on curing garlic and onions to be added.
Beets are a cooler weather crop, not for summers. To start this planting Bob covered them with garden cloth that allows filtered sun, air and water to penetrate while shading the crop so the beets won’t get woody.	This is a small planting of lima beans in the front here. Horseradish is growing behind that. It is a root crop that is one of the few plants we know with 2 different leaves.			Here is a closeup of some limas on the vines. This is a crop that once planted, does not like to be disturbed much. We try to leave them alone with gentle weeding.		This is a heat tolerant spinach called Mallobar. It is a vine that grows up and trellises nicely while bushing out at the bottom too. It has a slightly stronger flavor than regular spinach but is an easy grower, prolific, and will reseed itself for next year.
Living literally at the top of the hill presents some challenges when it comes to gardening. To overcome of them, we created terraces that broke the grade of the hill into steps. Strawberries flourished in years past but in 2006 we are trying watermelons and cantaloupes there as it seems to be a wet area they would like and they would have the room to spread out.
See our baby cantalope? This is our first year to plant a melon patch and the vines are taking over the lower terraces where they were planted.		The vines are literally jumping over the old railroad ties, down into the grass and up into the garden.
Stay tuned for updates on our melon patch! The watermelons are supposed to get to be 35 pounds! No sense in even trying to pick them without using the lawnmower and garden cart. Neither one of us could make it up the hill carrying one.
			Here is a picking from the 06 melon patch. Thank heavens for the garden cart!
			This apple tree was planted in 1987. We haven’t had too many harvests from it since it requires beating the squirrel and deer to the crop. But, when we do harvest they make good dried apples (try adding a little cinnamon and sugar), fried apples and pies. We have a cherry tree too. Bob has been fighting the squirrels and the birds for those. The are great cobbler and pie cherries, a little tart – not bad - but sugar helps with that.
What a great carrot crop in 06! Here is the happy farmer.
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