A Garden in Utah

I'm on the 2nd leg of my trip, when I left my sister's in Chicago, I boarded a plane to Salt Lake City to visit my brother.  They live in the suburbs of Salt Lake, and their backyard is the nicest view of  Utah Lake.  I've written about it before, but it deserves another mention.  Utah Lake is the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River.  It certainly is stunning.  Wouldn't you love this to be your backyard?

My brother's neighbor gave us a tour of her garden.  It was so cool!  She built this raised bed out of stacked rocks.  I really loved the look of it. 

Here, they are harvesting carrots.  They harvested over 100 pounds of carrots.  Amazing!  Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos of the harvested carrots.  They were beautiful nice sized carrots.  She told us that she didn't even bother with spacing out the carrot seeds, but rather, she just sprinkled the seeds all over the soil and let them grow.  She also didn't bother with thinning out the seedlings.  Yes sure, some of the carrots didn't have enough room to grow and grew super puny and thin, but for the most part, the carrots were nicely sized.

I was amazed by her tomato bed. The plants were jammed in there and she said they were big producers.  It was like a giant bush of tomatoes! 

She had a nice strawberry bed in her side yard. She said she planted 12 everbearing plants and it sent out runners and multiplied like crazy.  I saw that some of the plants had ripe strawberries still on it.  And she said it produced berries all summer long.  I have to invest in some everbearing plants to round out my Junebearing ones.

The most impressive part of all is when she showed us her canning stockpile.  And she said... "This is only the kitchen stockpile, I have lots more in the basement."  Wow!!!  All the jarred tomato sauce are from tomatoes grown in her garden.  The apple sauce she said, some were apples from her apple tree, and others were apples picked off of neighbor's trees.  She said that she went around the neighborhood in search of fruit trees ripe with fruit. She would go and  ring the homeowner's doorbell to ask if she could harvest the apples.  In exchange of harvesting, she would give them jars of processed apple sauce.  What a great exchange if you ask me!