Growing Your Own Food For Beginners – 7 Experiments

I have experienced a kind of love-hate relationship both with gardening and cooking. Growing my own food is thus not something that comes so easily to me. When I was little, my parents had a big vegetable garden and an orchard that produced a significant share of our daily food. We children were involved from an early age in weeding and picking up fruits. It was the same with cooking – I remember that when I was 7 years old, I often peeled the potatoes for my family’s dinner. And sometimes I felt that due to these duties, I missed out on playing and hanging out with my friends. When I was an adolescent and a young adult, I thus decided to hate both gardening and cooking. They had both “stolen” precious hours of my life 😊 .

Yet once I became a mother, a miracle happened. Things that I once thought I despised – including vegetables gardening and cooking – increasingly started to attract me. With this more loving mindset, I thus spent last week exploring my garden and its gifts. My aim was to find ways to introduce these precious treasures of autumn into my family’s eating habits.

1. Making my own fig and quince jam

A beautiful fig tree grows in my garden, planted by my home’s previous owners. Like many plants, trees, and shrubs, fig is not a tree I “met” in my childhood. I guess Estonia’s harsh winters are not so friendly for them. Initially, I was thus a bit lost as what to do with all figs that I discovered in my garden. I had tried to make a bit fig jam already last year and used some lemon juice. This year, however, I experimented with adding quince that I have in the garden instead of lemon juice. And the result was delicious!

2. Making grape juice with kids

This was the first autumn when I decided to use the grapes that grow in our garden. They are not very sweet and have many seeds. Being spoiled with the seedless sweet grapes we buy at the store, we first considered those not really edible. When I brought in some garden grapes for an afternoon snack last week, my boys had some, but abandoned most. Then an idea crossed my mind—why not try to make some grape juice with boys? I took a glass, strainer, and a wooden spoon and squeezed the first patch of grapes. The boys loved the activity, and the juice tasted delicious! Thirty minutes later, all the grapes that I had picked—presented also in the featured photo for this post—had vanished! I started to like growing my own food even more 😊 .

3. Using more nuts in cooking

We are blessed with a garden that has many old walnut trees. As with figs, I originally felt lost as what to do with the nuts, so we only ate them occasionally as snacks. The walnuts became more popular when Lev learned to use walnut crackers—since he loved the activity, he also ate more nuts😊 Last week my friend Nathalie suggested I make a walnut cake. The boys loved the idea and organised a team, where Lev cracked the nuts and Max cleaned them out of the shells. As I had my birthday, my husband finalised the process by baking me the beautiful birthday cake also presented in featured photos!

4. Freezing kale

I found this GoodLife Eats post that suggested freezing kale and decided to try it out. I had never done that before and always used fresh kale to make salads. To diversify, I decided to give a go and to use the frozen kale later in my cooking.

5. Planting an edible hedgerow

This year, we unfortunately had to cut a row of tall leylandii cypresses that were bordering our property. They were incredible habitats for many birds and squirrels. However, with each storm (and we have quite a few storms now where we live), some of those trees broke, falling on and damaging other trees in our garden. These trees had become a security hazard for my children and grazing livestock on the other side.

After grieving this loss, I embraced the opportunity to create a new hedge that it also provided. I initially thought to go for a more common evergreen monoculture hedge. Yet thanks to my friend Maya and some readings, I opted for an edible mixed hedgerow. Such a hedgerow is useful in many ways, both for our family and for wildlife, providing them a great habitat than a simple trimmed conifer hedge. I thus planted many dwarf fruit trees into my new hedgerow. Hopefully, in some years we are thus growing more food at home.

6. Expanding my vegetable garden in autumn

When we visited our house for the first time, I fell in love with its beautiful large vegetable garden. But since I was pregnant at the time, and then nursing, a year ahead, this incredible vegetable garden had vanished 🙁 Last year, when Rick was a bit older, I decided to start it again. We planted with the boys a few tomatoes, cucumbers, and bell peppers, beginning of our modest vegetables gardening. This spring we expanded our vegetable patch by adding kale, corn, and salad greens as well. My intention was to increase the number of vegetables a little every spring – until I learned that I can also expand my veggie garden in autumn!

In Estonia, the country where I grew up, we did not plant much in autumn. Lately I learned that several vegetables could be planted in autumn, such as broad beans, peas, garlic, and onions. Last week I went with Max and bought some beans and peas, and together, we sowed them into our little vegetable garden. Let’s see what comes out next year!

7. Baking a Fig Apple Fusion Cake

My boys are not fans of figs. Yet I wanted to use them for making a cake, so I decided to do a half-fig, half-apple cake, and everyone was happy!

CHALLENGES

Lack of know-how

Because of my childhood endeavours, I thought of myself as a seasoned gardener😊 Like with our efforts to recycle better, though, I became humbler last week. When googling how to be creative with grapes, I came across an article suggesting to freeze grapes and use them as ice cubes that do not dilute drinks! I liked the idea, but when I went few days later to collect grapes, they had already gone bad 🙁 The situation is similar with figs – I find difficult to know the right moment to pick them. My corn harvest – mostly due to late planting, lack of water and sun exposure, I guess – was also not very impressive. Many times I had to ask help from google to learn about growing your own food, for beginners.

The lack of know-how is often the situation with plants that I did not grow up cultivating, but by trial and error, I hope to improve! I feel that nature is guiding me, and each season, I learn new things.

Some days I just do not make it…

As discussed in my post on water conservation, having one day to focus on introducing each new habit is a great way to approach going green. Yet on some days this week, I just did not make it. Then I just caught up the next day and did two things, and that is okay as long as I keep going!

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE WEEK

When I was little, I thought of birds, insects and animals as kind of enemies of vegetables and of fruits, from whom the treasures of nature need to be protected (using scarecrows, for instance). As I grew older, I learned that many products are used to protect crops. Today, however, aware of the state of the Earth wildlife, I am very happy to

• Share the gifts of nature with wildlife!

Intentionally and sometimes unintentionally (as was the case with some grapes and figs), I leave fruits on trees for birds and walnuts for squirrels that love them. And I no longer have the feeling of waste that I used to have when such a situation happened in the past.