In the last 2 years, I have watched the Rhodes Family (from Abundant Permaculture) challenge themselves to 100 Days of Growing Food. The first year they did it I simply watched and thought “That’s pretty cool but I don’t I don’t think it’s doable here”. I mean, how can you do 100 days of growing food in PA? They live in North Carolina and have a longer growing season than us.

But then I did the math. From Memorial Day to Labor Day is 98 days, which really isn’t that long and it is our main growing season. So why not take the challenge? I presented the idea to the kiddos, and they were totally onboard. We even decided to make a deal that they could set up a farm stand with extra produce.

I always dream big when I start a new project, then reality hits….I took on so many new things this year and am basically drowning at this point. Last night I had a talk with the boys and we decided to scale back a lot from the original plan. We are going to just do the raised beds and planters this year. To improve the raised beds, we put down fabric weed barriers. We also added 5 pots of herbs and two potted blueberry bushes.

While we have decided not to plant the large pumpkin and squash patch that we had last year in the orchard (it got completely out of control very very quickly last year) we did make other improvements there. We added additional raspberry canes and put higher fences around everything as some of the trees have gotten tall enough that the deer were able to reach them over the previous fences.

We have to finish planting the cucumbers and cabbage in the one raised bed but I think we can finally say everything is planted for the year. I’ve also added a few new plants to the hydroponic system we have in the basement just to see what happens because we had plants left over. But our 100 days of Growing is officially well underway!