We have planted 40 fruit trees in our orchard including: apple, pear, plum, nectarine, peach, sweet and sour cherry, Asian plum, and apricot.  We have also planted pecans and hazelnuts, 40 raspberry canes, 30 blueberry bushes, 350 strawberry plants, rhubarb, red currants, and grapes.   We are also establishing a large  asparagus patch.  Next year we are hoping to add to the blueberries, and establish some paw paws and aronia berries.

In addition to our perennial fruits and vegetables, we plant large heirloom gardens each season.  We get 90% of our seeds from the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, though we have now started saving a few of our own, and have started sowing some friends’ seeds as well.  Our favorite plants seem to be tomatoes (almost any kind, we’re planting 21 heirloom varieties this year) and basil (can you ever have too much caprese salad?), but we are also enjoying new favorites like five color silverbeet chard and sorrel.  We are looking forward to trying new squashes this year, and having another go at some melons.  We may even try growing some millet for the chickens!

We love to put up the season’s harvest – canning, preserving and drying – and we offer workshops on food preservation in the late summer and fall. Part of our challenge is learning what we eat, and putting up enough of things in the right combinations to get us through to the next year (we’ve been trying to keep track of just how many cans of peaches we think our kids can eat in a year – so far, 50 quarts).  We’re working on fine-tuning that, and balancing it with the crop successes and failures of given years.