The tomato plants are starting to get big — still a few weeks before we can plant them outside, but we have plenty of healthy plants.
I had basically given up on the asparagus (they were older seeds), but I finally have five plants sprouted — this is part of my endeavor to get more plant once / harvest yearly stuff growing. 
And then there’s the chicken chow — this is Bocking 14 comfrey. It doesn’t go to seed, but provides a high-protein leafy food for chickens and turkeys.
Our hazelnut bushes are finally growing the male part of the flower that comes out in the Autumn! Fingers crossed, we’ll be harvesting hazelnuts this time next year. It’s been seven years since we planted the bushes, but deer and rabbits chomped them down to little nubs the first year they were planted.
The strawberries I planted two years ago are starting to produce! Anya picked fourteen ripe strawberries a few days ago, and she found a handful again today.
I’ve wanted to include a lot of permaculture in our home food production. Permaculture is basically creating a continuously agriculturally productive design. Trees, bushes, perennial plants are used to create a garden that is planted once and harvested for decades. I have some hazelnuts planted, and an apple tree from the locus year planting debacle. My idea is to add something every year instead of buying and planting everything in one season.
This year, I’m adding blueberries. In researching the purchase, we wanted to produce fruit this year (or, worst case, next). This meant buying 3 year-old plants. The local nurseries want 35$ per plant for 1-2 year old plants. Which … yeah, we’re not getting a lot of blueberries that way! I found a few places, though, that sell 3 year-old plants for about 14$ a plant (including shipping). I’ve got ten Hardyblue and ten Blueray plants ordered. We’ll have a lot of blueberries (although I’m sure we’ll lose some plants and won’t actually have 20).
In the future, I want to add pawpaw, raspberries, rhubarb, more apple trees, peach trees, and more hazelnuts.
I’m intrigued by the idea of permaculture gardening — creating landscape installations that are planted once and are then self-sufficient. For growing food, it is a slow process — the tomatoes we plant this year will produce this year. The fruit, nut, asparagus, etc that we plant this year … we’ll get some in two or three years at the earliest (some nut trees take a decade to produce!). But they’ll keep producing year after year. In some cases, they’ll even spread.
We planted some apple and peach trees from Trees of Antiquity last year – and then found out it was a cicada year (i.e. a really bad year to have new trees). Well, most of our new trees made it. This year, I want to start some asparagus and nut trees.
I selected hazelnuts to start — first, we all love hazelnuts. And it really doesn’t make much sense to put effort into growing something you won’t enjoy. But they also produce nuts in 2-5 years. I ordered them from Willis Orchard — I’ve read good and bad reviews of the place, but the shipped prices were great and I read a lot of bad reviews about pretty much any nursery or orchard. Hazard of shipping live products.
The trees were small, but I knew that when I purchased them. I love how these bare root trees where shipped. There’s some gooey gel stuff around the bare roots that keeps the trees hydrated (esp good when you are SUPER slow about planting your bare root trees!).
We’re starting asparagus from seed — it takes longer, but I was able to get unique strains unavailable as crowns. I picked up some berry seeds too – no idea if they’ll actually grow (this is more of an experiment than an attempt to cover the yard with cane fruits and cranberries). And strawberries — Home Depot had a whole bunch of strawberry plants well before it was reasonable to plant them … but they were beautiful plants on clearance. They’re still potted and located close to the house to keep warm.
I also want to replace our ornamental grasses with something useful (and hopefully something that doesn’t spread into the lawn and create an unmowable fibrous mass). Maybe a patch of oats that can reseed themselves.