What's in Season

One of the pleasures of growing food is that you don't get everything all the time. The strawberries come and go. Suddenly there are more raspberries than you know what to do with. Tomatoes take over the kitchen. Apples begin dropping from the trees. Then, almost before you notice it, another growing season is winding down.

That's how we like it at Sweet Botanicals.

We grow without synthetic pesticides or artificial fertilizers, and we don't try to make our produce look like it came from a supermarket. An apple may have a spot on it. A carrot may have two legs. A raspberry may never make it from the garden to the house. That's real food.

What we grow also changes from year to year, so this isn't a catalog or a promise of availability. It's a general guide to what you might find growing around Sweet Botanicals as the seasons change.

Spring

Spring begins with the garden coming back to life. Herbs return, fruit trees bloom, berry bushes leaf out, and the first vegetables go into the ground. Depending on what we've planted, this is the season for early greens, lettuce, spinach, radishes, peas and other cool-weather vegetables.

It's also the season of anticipation. Blossoms on the apple, pear, peach and plum trees give us the first hint of what the year's fruit crop might look like.

Summer

This is when things get busy.

Blueberries begin ripening, followed by raspberries, and the vegetable garden starts producing in earnest. Tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, zucchini, peppers, herbs and whatever else we've planted begin finding their way into the kitchen.

July and August can produce considerably more than two people can eat, which is one reason we're beginning to think about putting some of our extra harvest out at a small roadside stand.

Availability will depend entirely on what's ripe that week. When nature gives us a mountain of raspberries, there may be raspberries. When it doesn't, there won't be.

Fall

By late summer and early fall, attention begins shifting toward the orchard.

Apples, pears, peaches and plums ripen at different times depending on the variety and the year. The vegetable garden continues producing tomatoes, peppers, root vegetables, squash and other late-season crops until cold weather finally catches up with us.

Fall is also when we preserve some of the year's harvest and start thinking about what worked, what didn't and what we'd like to grow differently next year.

Winter

Winter is quieter.

There may be herbs or greens growing under cover, and there are things we've stored, frozen, dried or preserved from the previous season. But mostly winter is when the land rests and we plan.

Seed catalogs appear. Garden plans change. We inevitably decide to grow something we hadn't planned on growing.

And then spring comes around and we start all over again.

What's Available Right Now?

If we begin putting produce, berries or herbs out at the roadside, we'll post current availability here on the blog.

Sweet Botanicals isn't trying to provide every vegetable every week of the year. We'd rather share what the land happens to be giving us when it's ready.

That's what "in season" means here.