I talked about canning in my last post. We can seven months out of the year. Sometimes frantically, because the produce is coming in so fast. Sometimes just a few hours for a small batch. But the real fun is eating fresh food and planning meals based on what is available in the garden. 

Physically work in the garden needs to be paired down or made more efficient as baby boomers age. We've had to learn to adjust the garden as necessary. We installed a drip system that both avoids dragging hoses around the yard and lowers our water bill. Now that we are both home because we are retired, our garden in physically smaller, but more intensive. We grow more in a smaller space. We use less water and we have more time for weeding, hoeing and succession gardening. 

We also set up a kitchen herb garden close to the house to save steps when we are cooking. We raise less things that are for fun and more things that we will pick and eat or can. Our plan is to garden both for canning and right to the table eating for the next six to eight years. 

The biggest change for our age was to add a stainless steel rolling counter in the kitchen. It was marketed as a bar cart. It has a stainless steel top, a drawer, two shelves, and two attached bins. There are also locking wheels. We can roll the cart to the sink area and use it as a preparation table. The scraps can be put directly into one of the attached bins. The drawer is for the flats and lids. 

The rolling cart is also used to move the large canning pots from the sink to the stove since we are not as strong as we age. The bottom shelves are great for storage for the canning pots and flats of jars. 

At that point, we will only grow for direct to table eating, so the garden will be a third the size and closer to the house. We won't be canning at that point.