This land is your land... This land is my land...

The Beacon Street Farm family is off to New Mexico for a couple weeks. If I get a chance maybe I'll post some farming-in-the-desert pictures. In the meantime, here's what happens when you get a lot of rain:

The east-side garden bed

Potatoes in the backyard

Latest development on the farm

We raised the height of our rain barrel to experiment with gravity-fed watering. This rain barrel is located on top of our compost bin, which is inside the chicken coop...

So beautiful, it hurts....

Red-veined sorrel

Shelling Peas are in

Want your kids to eat vegetables? Sit them down with a colander of shelling peas and watch them get devoured...

The Great Salad Wall of Beacon Street

The lovely Amanda Cook sent me a link on how to create vertical growing walls using pallets. Here is my work in progress at the Beacon Street Farm.

Here is the link Amanda sent me: Life on the Balcony

More on The Open Door

Last week Grace and I and a couple of our dedicated garden participants harvested a huge amount of spring greens to make way for our summer crops, most of which are interplanted with what's left of our spring crops. Here are some pictures of spring crops before the harvest...

Here are some of our spring crops that haven't matured yet or we're waiting for them to get bigger before we start to harvest...

Snap peas

Bush beans

Broccoli

Swiss Chard & Kale

The harvest! 

Summer crops interplanted with remaining spring crops...

Tomato seedling interplanted with radishes

Eggplant seedlings interplanted with lettuce

This photo was taken 3 short weeks ago in The Open Door garden, where I work with Garden Participants who collectively tend the garden and take part in the harvest (work-share style).

Since this picture, the peas behind me have reached the tipidy-top of their netting, the cutting greens, radishes and lettuce in the foreground (beds 3 and 8) have gotten HUGE and have been harvested from not once but twice. This time of year is SO exciting.
There's just so much food.
Last Wednesday (the 30th of March), we harvested greens to make space for all of our Summer crops- We planted Tomatoes, Peppers, Eggplant, Summer Squash and Cucumbers.
stay tuned for more!

-If you want to know more about The Open Door Garden Project, or if you'd like to become a participating member of the garden, please call The Open Door at: (978) 283-6776

All the best,
Grace

Warm Purple Potato Salad

I pulled a rogue potato plant out of my front bed. A lovely purple variety that grew from a lost and forgotten seed potato from last year. Boiled them and made a warm potato salad - just added olive oil, balsamic vinegar, roasted garlic, salt and pepper. Simple and good.