Benefits and Challenges of Raised Bed Gardening

Today, we discuss our experience at Five Feline Farm with raised bed gardening. For us, this system works better than traditional in-ground gardening.

Let us know if you have any questions, we answer every email.

Speaking of challenges, we are balancing some unexpected schedule changes, so this recording was made in the car. Donna was driving and Julia was managing the phone. Please forgive the sound quality.

Saving Money by Saving Seeds

In this episode, Donna describes the why and how of saving seeds to replant next season.

You will also hear us discuss raised beds. This system of gardening provides plenty of benefits, but instead of buying expensive pre-fab beds, we learned to build our own. You can too.

How To Build Your Own Raised Garden Beds

As always, thank you for listening.

Donna, Julia, and the Felines

Reinventing Five Feline Farm

Welcome back to the Five Feline Farm podcast, formerly known as Farm Chatter, now From Soil to Story. This new title reflects the changes we’ve made in our business to encompass a sharpening of our interests.

In this episode, we explain a bit of our history and our current projects.

Without change, we can’t grow.

Subscribe to our Youtube channel: @fivefelinefarm

If you’d like a free downloadable novella, check out The Decision, A Prologue to Landow Creek.

Tomatoes in November?

Yes! We still have a few ripe garden tomatoes.

It has frosted here in Central Illinois and the tomato plants are gone from the garden which means the remaining green and half ripe ones are in the garage to slowly finish ripening. End of the season tomatoes are not sizeable enough for slicing, although diced or quartered onto a salad still tastes fresh and amazing. Most of the remaining will be used as cooking tomatoes. Only a few are ripe at a time, so it becomes a challenge to use up varying amounts. 

The Options

One option I have used is to juice a couple of small batches and store each in the refrigerator until there is enough to justify getting out the canner. Using this method, I canned 6 more quarts of juice. Now we have the base for 6 more pots of chili, or with some additional seasoning, this could be 24 more Bloody Mary’s. 

Now on the kitchen counter awaits another small group of tomatoes. What to do with these? 

A fresh sauce perhaps? Cooked and pureed with Italian seasonings, these will give a taste of summer in a lasagna or some other pasta dish. 

Or maybe chop along with the end of the garden peppers and make a season ending fresh salsa. 

Following the directions in a previous post about Sunshine Mary’s, I could do a traditional, fresh Bloody Mary with these small numbers of tomatoes.

What if I consult the Julia Child cook books and try a French dish with tomatoes? 

The possibilites abound. Any of these will make for a fine meal. 

And the winner is…..

Come back next week to find out what delicious creation I made.

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