Harvesting and Cooking My Home Grown Organic Spinach

Hello everyone,

This time I want to tell you about my first harvest ever. As you may recall, I am a new home farmer looking to eat better and improve my family's and my health in the process. This venture started a little more than a month ago (October 25, 2016) and I already made my first mistake (you can read my post about it here) that made me lose some of my plants. But now it's all good news, my first harvest ever.

Spinach survived and it was time to harvest some baby ones and try them out. My mom helped me cook them into a tasty omelette with cheese and it was delicious. All I did was cut with a pair of scissors some of the best leaves I found on the plants while preserving the smallest ones so the plant can keep producing in the weeks to come. The rest was my mom, she took care of cleaning and cooking them. The result was a nice family breakfast with my family.

If you are thinking to start growing your food I recommend you to do it. It will be rewarding, delicious and at the same time I assure you that if you keep it organic you will be helping your body to stay healthy. 

Below is a video of the harvest and cooking the spinach along with a super simple recipe of the omelette my mom cooked for us. I hope you enjoy it and find it useful. 

Thanks for reading!

AG

Never Use Oil Pesticides When Sunny

Everything was going well, I had a total of 50 sq ft planted on 3 different raised beds and the first 18 where already growing. I started noticing little holes on the leaves of the spinach plants so I made some research and found out it was aphids.

Being concerned with chemicals on food I looked for home made organic pesticides and I came across a recipe that called for 1 cup of cooking oil, 1 tablespoon of dish soap (the biodegradable kind of soap) and 1 pint of water. All mixed well and placed into a sprayer bottle. I did everything the recipe said, however, It never occurred to me that there were correct times to apply it.

It was about noon and being the month of November there was no concern with heat or anything like that. I applied the mix evenly in all of the 2 first raised beds I had planted and the only ones with plants already on them. I even applied the mix to my papaya pots. I did this as a precaution more than as a fix because I only had aphids on 3 or 4 sq ft of the first bed and my thought was that by spraying into the infected ones the insects were going to jump into the other ones so I wanted to prevent that.

Well, it was a mistake. I practically burned my broccoli and my radishes with this pesticide. I learned the hard way that this should be applied gently and in the afternoon after the sun is going down. After thinking a little bit is now common sense to me that the oil got stuck into the leaves and the sun pretty much cooked those plants. This is the result:

 

 

As you can imagine I was sad because this was going to be my first harvest and it had taking me about 4 weeks of time since I started caring for this plants. 3 days after applying the pesticide I pulled the plants out, remixed the soil and replanted on those squares. 

Thanks for Reading,

AG

Start of a Journey

Good morning everyone,

Welcome to my blog, my name is Adrian and I decided to create this "diary" in order to keep track of my progress as a I go along trying to organically grow the fruits and vegetables that me and my family consume. At first I tried writing down dates and taking pictures but as time goes by I find it more difficult to keep track of everything that happens in my little organic farm.

For now I will give you a summary of what I have done so far and later I will start adding as the days go by.

I started by creating a 3 x 3 (or almost) sq ft. raised bed in order to plant my first vegetables. This was done on October 25, 2016 with the help of my youngest daughter Emma and our Chihuahua Lola. In this bed I planted 3 squares of Spinach (total of 27 plants as per the Square Foot Garden method), 3 Broccoli plants and 48 plants of Radishes. The same day I also planted 8 pots with Papaya seeds.

On November 4 I decided to build a second box with the same dimensions as the old one using scrap wood I had from an old fence. This bed also has 9 squares where I planted 54 more Spinach plants and 3 more Broccoli plants.

For the most part they have been germinating nicely and it got me excited to keep on doing this so I went ahead and with the help of my dad built a compost bin (or fence) and a new 8' x 4' raised bed with cedar pickets (the ones you will use to put up a fence). In this bet I planted Garlic, Bush Beans, Beets, Radishes, Romaine Lettuce, Swiss Chard and Carrots. This was done on Nov 19.

These are the pictures. As I said before I am giving you a summary of what I've done so far but I promise to keep the posts cleaner as I go along and guide you through my thinking, my mistakes and my accomplishments.