Creating a New Garden Update

The new garden build is coming along nicely even if it does feel like it’s taking a long time.

We had the long Memorial Day weekend to devote to the garden and it felt so good.   More shoveling of wood chips, building raised beds, testing the creation process of an 18 day grass compost, building and painting a new picnic table, etc.

The garden is a  big investment in time, energy and money but because the land here is only good for raising tobacco or soybean there is little choice but to build a garden area from scratch.

The ideal would be to plant earth creating plants such as winter rye and clover, add wood chips and leaf mold and wait a few years until it becomes suitable soil for gardening food.

We will use that method later to build the market garden.  In the meantime our raised bed garden should provide all the food we need for the coming year, in addition to the chicks (which arrive next week) which will provide meat, eggs and new chicks for next year.

For dinner we roasted organic chicken in the grill, wild rice and our first home grown spinach.

I roasted the 3 lb organic pastured chicken stuffed with a half onion and herbs, and laid thick sliced bacon strips over its breast and legs.  Then it was set onto thick onion slices set on the bottom of a cast iron skillet (the onion slices act as a trivet) and roasted on the grill at 350-375F for about an hour.

The bacon strips keep helps keep the chicken juicy and are removed for the last half hour of roasting.  The combination of the chicken juices, bacon grease and onion makes an fantastic au jus for basting during the last half hour of roasting.  Yum!

The spinach was delicious.   It was full of flavor and not coarse or gritty like store bought.  I steamed it with a bit of salt, pepper and garlic.