New beginnings in the garden are numerous this time of year. After so many months of preparing the garden I’m beginning to see the fruits of our labors. It’s so rewarding after weeding, amending the soil, planning and sowing the seeds to see these tiny little plants sprouting up.

This year we also decided to do a few things differently in our garden seems like each year we are trying to improve upon the past year. Always searching for the perfect way to get a bumper crop of something we planted. One of the additions to our garden this year is our cloches. We began with pvc tubing and covered them with greenhouse plastic. I got some of my ideas from here and here. When I get some time and I see how our cloches perform I plan write my own instructional tutorial.

What is a cloche you ask? It also goes by other names like mini hoop house or mini wind tunnel. I however prefer to call them cloches. They are row covers put in place to extend the gardening season. Now where you live you might not need to extend the season but here in the Pacific Northwest we can use all the extra time we can get. By adding the cloche to a row or rows it give the plants some extra warmth they might not usually get and gives them a head start on sprouting and on their way to producing earlier or longer. I’m excited to see the results we get from using these.

This year we also doubled the size of our garden. Double the pleasure, double the fun, I mean work!  With pumpkins, butternut, straight neck, cabbage, carrots, beets, cauliflower, chard and beans all in attendance in the new lower garden we do have our work cut out for us. I can’t wait to do up some vegetables to ferment and create some homemade probiotics.

In our upper garden we have 16 blueberry bushes that look like they will be producing quite nicely this year, can’t wait to make some Rhubarb Blueberry Crisp. We also have a large number of snow peas coming up that ought to have me swimming in snow peas come mid June. Cucumbers, kale, green onions, couple different types of lettuce, arugula, and more green beans finish off the uncovered section of the upper garden.

Sheltered under the cloches you will find the beginnings of spaghetti squash, butternut, zucchini, basil, kabocha squash, peppers and eggplant. All these little gems can use a little extra heat generated by the greenhouse type environment created by the cloches.

So as you can see my fingers will be pretty busy this summer weeding and harvesting, and hopefully creating some wonderful new recipes with our bounty.
What are you growing g this year?  Share in the comments below, I would love to know.

Tags:  garden vegetables