Where it all started…
Our first garden was so sweet!
About 5 years ago, after doing a shared garden with a dear friend on her property, I developed a budding desire to start a vegetable garden of my own. So, I shared my ideas with my husband and as he often does, he indulged me and got right to work. At that time we were living in another town, on a decent sized residential lot. We decided on a 10ft x 10ft raised bed garden with a gate, so the chickens wouldn’t get inside and destroy everything. Looking back, it really was a great little garden. I really didn’t know anything about gardening, (despite having a shared garden the year prior) and anything else I had attempted previously, only built a case against me that proved I did not have a green thumb. But that wasn’t going to deter me because I wanted to garden. I was going to garden. And it was going to be great. Period. (oh boy…)
That first Spring, I planted tomatoes, sunflowers, zucchini, bell peppers, strawberries and some snap peas. I think that’s often pretty standard for a beginner gardener. Before I knew it everything was growing beautifully! I was pretty pleased with myself because gardening was obviously my thing, right?! Sure it was…until reality hit. First, I noticed some weird eggs on my squash that I later learned were squash bugs. Then I kept seeing these green caterpillars and they were devastating my tomato plants! Later I found out they were hornworms. In a panic, I quickly researched what the pests were and how to get rid of them. I wanted to garden 100% organically, which ended up being a bit tedious in the way of pest control and I still lost quite a bit of my plants. This sent me on another journey into what to do to prevent them and is how I learned about companion planting and other best practices, since prevention is far better than treating issues after the fact. (If you're interested in learning more about companion planting as pest control, hang tight because I’ll be posting about that soon as well.)
Fast forwarding to our garden now, I so appreciate the simplicity of that little garden and learning from those mistakes while on a small and manageable scale. I value those experiences so much because they were the launching pad in to what we are doing now. It would have been overwhelming and likely defeating if we had encountered those issues on a much larger scale. My hope in sharing the mistakes we made and challenges we faced, is for others to have a ready resource that can answer their questions, so they can be successful from the start. Gardening is so rewarding and teaches us so much!
How our current garden started when we first moved here.
When we moved to this house, we got a little bit of property and our current garden is now 8,000 sqft. It started as another raised bed garden that was 24ft x 24ft, but we quickly outgrew it and expanded to what we have now. Currently we have 11 different types of fruit trees, myriads of fruits and vegetables and I am constantly trying new plants, just to see if I can have success with them and continue to diversify our food options. It's a constant evolution with an end goal of being able to have a year round garden so we can eat seasonally, rather than just based on what we would buy at the store because that’s what we know and have always done. It also gives us a great opportunity to try out new recipes that we otherwise wouldn’t likely have tried.
Our current garden…which we are still working on growing in to.
Our plans for the Spring include a vineyard on our front pasture. I've been preparing the ground with a heavy layer of woodchips and leaf mulch this summer and plan to have it going next year. I'll share more about that as we make progress. Stay tuned…