Do you ever have a hard time using up all your garden produce, or struggle to get anything to grow? With the right gardening and harvesting methods, your family can get the most out of your edible garden, from getting a large summer yield to saving big on grocery bills with the right food storage methods.

Keep reading for a few tips on how to use up everything your garden has to offer, including improving its growth with a leafcutter bee house from Kind Bee Farms!

Grow What You Actually Like

In colder climates like Saskatchewan, we tend to focus more on what will grow in our soil and withstand our weather conditions, rather than on what we really want to plant. When it comes to growing an edible garden, it is important to pick vegetables that you really enjoy eating, especially the ones that will be in season throughout the summer.

If snap peas grow well in your region but you don’t tend to reach for them as a snack, just leave them out! Adding a certain vegetable to your garden plot may fill out the space or be easy to grow, but if you don’t want to eat it, it will likely go to seed or end up in the compost pile.

If you end up with extra space in your edible garden, you can always fill it out with companion plants like flowers or herbs (in fact, including more flowering plants is a great way to attract pollinators like leafcutter bees!).

Eat What’s Growing While It’s Growing

One of the best benefits of an edible garden is how much of it you can eat during the growing season. Vegetables and herbs like lettuce, basil, chives, cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, and peppers grow quickly and abundantly during the summer months.

Create a garden-to-table meal plan for the summer to make sure all of the in-season vegetables are used up. You can even cut your grocery bill by using only the produce from your garden for meals!

Start Canning, Freezing, and Preserving

Whether you have a big or small garden, it’s not always possible to use up all your vegetables and fruit before they go bad. You can preserve your food and save on store-bought shelf-stable items by canning, freezing, and freeze-drying your garden’s yield.

Pickles, fruit in syrup, jam, tomato sauce, freeze-dried herbs—there are many different recipes you can make that will preserve your edible garden and fill up your pantry for the winter.

If you end up with more canned and frozen preserves than you can use, give them as gifts or get a farm-to-table stand at the local farmers’ market!

Improve Your Yield with Increased Pollination

While some gardeners struggle to use up their yield, others struggle to get any growth from their garden. There are many ways to improve plant growth, such as mulching, growing in pots, fertilizing, improving biodiversity, and—where our team at Kind Bee Farms comes in—increasing your pollinator population.

Including plenty of flowering plants and colours that pollinators like can help attract them, but you can also introduce pollinators directly with a leafcutter bee house for your garden from Kind Bee Farms!

Leafcutter bees are a docile, quick-flying bee species, known as “superpollinators” due to their 1:20 pollinating ratio compared to honeybees. Leafcutter bees are drawn to low-growing plants, making them the ideal pollinator for vegetable patches and berry bushes.

You can add leafcutter bees to your garden with our Bee Starter Kit. This comes equipped with a box of 200+ bees, paper nesting tubes, and an acacia-wood bee house that is built to handle complex summer weather conditions and keep your bee cocoons safe!

Leafcutter bees are most effective when your garden is already in bloom, so the best time to add them to your garden is when outdoor temperatures are consistently 20°C or above. Within a few weeks, you will start to see your garden burst forward with growth.

Get a Bee House for Your Garden from Kind Bee Farms

If you want to get the most out of your garden, partner with Kind Bee Farms and watch your vegetable patches burst forward! With enhanced pollination, you can enjoy a bigger yield and nutritious meals all summer long.

Visit our Shop to learn more about our Bee Starter Kit, and read our Blog for more fun facts about Leafcutter bees.