Our large garden is truly Miranda’s happy place. We practice organic growing practices and welcome organized chaos into our beds, allowing many vegetables to bolt and flower to provide food for native bees. We love the native pollinators and try to provide plenty of food and habitat for them; we also host Queen Bee Apiary each summer. The soil is fueled by rabbit manure, compost and cover crops. We save many of our seeds and choose local producers like Adaptive Seeds for the seeds we do purchase. You won’t find chemicals here, just lots of biodiversity and delicious food.
This page will continue to be a work in progress, just like our gardens! Check back occasionally to see what’s new.
Our garden is our main source of food in the summer and we grow plenty of extras to can or dehydrate for pantry storage and hopefully get good enough yields to share the bounty with our limited CSA. Occasionally the gophers and voles decide the ‘extras’ were all for them, so every season is a gamble.
Listed below are the varieties we are growing this season. Many were started by seed, a few purchased as plants from local growers. Many of our seeds were saved from last year’s garden, others were purchased from our favorite seed supplier Adaptive Seeds.
Want to share our bounty? I offer limited ‘harvest baskets’ through the summer to local veggies loves to pick up on farm or have delivered to Corvallis area. Contact me to inquire about being part of our small network of produce buyers!
Varieties for 2020
Peppers: Hot: “Super Duper Chillies” (i’ve been saving seeds from my favorite babies originally grown as ‘super chilly’ which is a hybrid. Every year they’re a little different and always spicy! Great for drying.) Sureno, Early Jalepeno, Korean. Bell: Golden Star F1
Tomatoes: All are tomato seeds are home saved. This year we’re keeping it simple with our favorite paste and favorite slicer: Jory, Paul Robeson.
Eggplant: You’ll find a few japanese eggplants tucked into our pepper row. This year we’re growing the green “Thai Long Green.”
Zucchini: We LOVE zucchini around here. I toss it into just about every meal while we have it fresh, sell some at market and dehydrate or feed the ducks what we can’t get to eating right away. Dehydrated zucchini is great tossed into just about any dish as you’re cooking and is a great source of green veg in the winter months. We grow Mutibile zucchini and will always only grow this variety: super productive all season long, very thin and tender skin, never tough, never seedy.
Winter Squash: Early butternut and a few jack o lanterns take advantage of the warmth in our greenhouse.
Potatoes: We popped some Yellowfin into the hoop house for early potatoes and picked up some Yukon Gem for the main potato patch.
Beans: This year we’re tossing in all the ‘extras’ from previous years’ seed packets so our fresh eating beans will be a mix: all tasty! This year we’re growing Arikara beans to dry (our favorite)
Greens: We could eat kale every day, so we plant a lot of it. This year we are growing “Dazzling Blue Lacinato” which really is dazzling! We also grow rainbow chard for market and as feed for the ducks.
Brassica and salad: Pirachicaba broccoli is the COOLEST variety, producing lots of baby broccolis that everyone loves. We’re skipping kohlrabi this year. Primax cabbage, mixed salads and plenty of other green yummy things will be tucked into the garden this year. We’re also trying our hands at Amaranth to add to the salad.
Garlic: I love growing garlic and have a usually thriving crop of softneck and hardneck. This year has been frought with underground beasts (pocket gophers!) so my yield will be much lower than normal. Sadly this means no garlic will be for sale at market. I grow Nootka Rose, Russian Red and a few varieties of no-longer-remember-the-name hardnecks. All are grown using seed i’ve saved year after year for the past 4 seasons. I added “oregon blue’ from Fillary Farm this year.
Onions: Patterson, Mary Nagy’s Transylvanian Red, Expression.
Cover Crops: Working with our soil is a challenge, so we use lots of cover crops between our vegetable rotations. Daikon radish is an edible favorite that mines deep into our hard soil to break it up. Other favorites include: sudangrass, buckwheat, berseem clover, forage peas, fava beans.
