August Newsletter: Gardening Season!

Our gardening year usually kicks off by about late January, when I can’t take it anymore and start organizing my library of seeds (yes, I have a seed problem!), and while I don’t need any seeds, without fail, I put in my huge seed order yet again and get planting by the end of the month. All the seed trays head out to the Herb Cottage and slowly start to come to life! By about February I start imagining all the possibilities of where I will plant all these seedlings and how I want my gardens to grow this year. My friend Natalie says that’s my meditation :-) She’s not wrong! 

This late winter and early spring I had a much bigger task list with getting ready for our first official spring retreats, Pilates Pedagogy and our Signature Retreat (both went beautifully!), but it meant I needed to get busy in the gardens even earlier.

After two successful retreats, suddenly it was mid-May and time for the hard core planting work to truly begin. This year I ended up with a total of 54 heirloom tomato plants, 20+ pepper plants, rows of cucumbers, beets, carrots, celery, tomatillos, winter & summer squash, snap peas, green beans, sweet potatoes, eggplant, watermelon, and more! All the cold crops planted in late winter/early spring (collards, broccoli, lettuce, kale, the list goes on….) need to be harvested, stored and/or eaten daily. Ultimately they’re pulled out of the garden and turned into compost.

This year we had our most bountiful berry harvest yet. Our young stone fruit orchard is still growing but one of our peach trees gave at least a bushel.  A few delicious treats have already been preserved in anticipation of our fall retreat! 

Then there are my real favorites, the herbs. The herb garden gets planted early and goes through out summer. Pretty much any and every culinary herb you can think of, I plant it! I took a deep dive into an herbalism class this spring and loved it, but more on that later :-)

I am writing this from the farm after returning from our trip first to the west coast to see family, then to the east coast to teach Pilates and now home to the massive amount of work from my absence and the bounty of the garden. As gardeners, we call this the harvest season! 

I use to tell people back in Dallas that my goals were to eat food from the garden at every meal, every day, and have fresh flowers on every table in the house! I certainly have manifested this! 

Happy gardening y’all!