I am also a Jew who spent a lifetime in cities and is now living with a husband and dog in a tiny hamlet (< 400 souls) in Maine, with a huge garden. I also had no clue whatsoever how to garden, but I recognized that my time of being gainfully employed had come to an end and guessed that Living Off The Land might work. Our place is the size of a small farm. I did a ton of research. I'm still not a very good farmer but we get enough. The growing season is so short and stuff that's put up is so repulsive I've given up on the self sufficiency thing but we do eat off the garden all summer, and the potato crop lasts until spring. I don't re-read the books I got to learn how to farm and if you'd like, you could have them, my husband and I are voracious readers and we need the shelf space. Anyway, welcome to Maine, a delight to have stumbled tonight onto your blog.
Oh, this is so lovely! I’m not up to farming — our yard is small and mostly shaded, so figuring out what it can sustain. The woman who owned the house before us told us nothing grows there. I’m starting with wildflowers (failed last summer, but hoping this summer is sunnier and not as wet). Nice to meet another Jew in Maine :-)
Lettuce, scallions and arugula can tolerate partial shade, and also they tolerate the cold. Plant them as soon in the spring as the soil can be worked. The arugula comes up first, then the lettuce, both within about a month. The scallions take all season but then they become perennial and they’re the first things up when the snow melts.
When you weed, start with the plants you know are weeds. When they’re little, pull them up by the roots and get rid of them or they’ll grow back. Get rid of enough weed shoots and you’ll start to see a line of what you planted. The real trick is, once your plants are a few inches wide, get rid of every single weed and then mulch around them with about 3” of shredded dead leaves. The leaves keep in the moisture, discourage weeds, and decompose to help grow the soil. We have a shredder but some people just mow over piles of leaves a few times.
I am not Jewish, but am a lifelong gardener, recently medically retired myself from my main job, and cited the time to do weeding as one benefit of retiring to my former workmates. So your title caught my eye. Because I am not a professional writer my writing is in no danger of strangely being rejected (I write a blog mostly read by a few family members, in which I write my gardening updates and about family history, limiting myself to anecdotes that will not create family rifts!); but I retired a couple years ago from adjunct teaching when I found too much of the fun was going out of it because everyone was being so careful about what they said about an ever-widening range of biological words and concepts, and feeling that I was courting a summoning by the dean for reeducation for talking even about something as basic as X and Y chromosomes and using language such as "your mother" "your father" was just not worth it after a while. Anyway, we moved from suburbia to the country about 6 years ago, and much of our acquaintance seem to think that was such an eccentric thing to do, but I love having the space to grow things, and somehow owning multiple acres of land just satisfies something very deep in my soul. PS to Shelah, we have two chest freezers now; blanching and freezing is my go-to for my vegetable produce, and just plain freezing for berries, except the two things I know I can do the canning process reliably for, which are tomatoes and applesauce. Chest freezers are pretty economical. Don't know if that's different than what you've been doing for preservation already.
I am also a Jew who spent a lifetime in cities and is now living with a husband and dog in a tiny hamlet (< 400 souls) in Maine, with a huge garden. I also had no clue whatsoever how to garden, but I recognized that my time of being gainfully employed had come to an end and guessed that Living Off The Land might work. Our place is the size of a small farm. I did a ton of research. I'm still not a very good farmer but we get enough. The growing season is so short and stuff that's put up is so repulsive I've given up on the self sufficiency thing but we do eat off the garden all summer, and the potato crop lasts until spring. I don't re-read the books I got to learn how to farm and if you'd like, you could have them, my husband and I are voracious readers and we need the shelf space. Anyway, welcome to Maine, a delight to have stumbled tonight onto your blog.
Oh, this is so lovely! I’m not up to farming — our yard is small and mostly shaded, so figuring out what it can sustain. The woman who owned the house before us told us nothing grows there. I’m starting with wildflowers (failed last summer, but hoping this summer is sunnier and not as wet). Nice to meet another Jew in Maine :-)
Lettuce, scallions and arugula can tolerate partial shade, and also they tolerate the cold. Plant them as soon in the spring as the soil can be worked. The arugula comes up first, then the lettuce, both within about a month. The scallions take all season but then they become perennial and they’re the first things up when the snow melts.
When you weed, start with the plants you know are weeds. When they’re little, pull them up by the roots and get rid of them or they’ll grow back. Get rid of enough weed shoots and you’ll start to see a line of what you planted. The real trick is, once your plants are a few inches wide, get rid of every single weed and then mulch around them with about 3” of shredded dead leaves. The leaves keep in the moisture, discourage weeds, and decompose to help grow the soil. We have a shredder but some people just mow over piles of leaves a few times.
I am not Jewish, but am a lifelong gardener, recently medically retired myself from my main job, and cited the time to do weeding as one benefit of retiring to my former workmates. So your title caught my eye. Because I am not a professional writer my writing is in no danger of strangely being rejected (I write a blog mostly read by a few family members, in which I write my gardening updates and about family history, limiting myself to anecdotes that will not create family rifts!); but I retired a couple years ago from adjunct teaching when I found too much of the fun was going out of it because everyone was being so careful about what they said about an ever-widening range of biological words and concepts, and feeling that I was courting a summoning by the dean for reeducation for talking even about something as basic as X and Y chromosomes and using language such as "your mother" "your father" was just not worth it after a while. Anyway, we moved from suburbia to the country about 6 years ago, and much of our acquaintance seem to think that was such an eccentric thing to do, but I love having the space to grow things, and somehow owning multiple acres of land just satisfies something very deep in my soul. PS to Shelah, we have two chest freezers now; blanching and freezing is my go-to for my vegetable produce, and just plain freezing for berries, except the two things I know I can do the canning process reliably for, which are tomatoes and applesauce. Chest freezers are pretty economical. Don't know if that's different than what you've been doing for preservation already.