Garden Newbie

It was our first year planting this garden so we really didn’t know what would do well or not. I also had only grown a small garden for years with only a few things in it, so gardening on a big scale was very new to me. We started out so excited to just plant as much as we could and hope for the best. We started lots of our seeds early; some did really well, others didn’t. Some died and I replanted. Some froze and then came back to life! Gardening in 2020 was a fun project to do with the kids while they did school from home last spring.

As the snow melted and the days got warmer we got excited to get plants in the ground. Too bad for us the ground was so wet that  your boots would sink into the lawn trying to walk through the yard. It seemed to take forever for the yard to dry out enough to till up the garden. Then we found out how wonderful our soil really was. It was still too cold to get the plants in the ground but the weeds were growing like crazy! 

Once the garden was planted it was lovely seeing all of our plants growing and I would often just walk around enjoying the sight while drinking my coffee. That lasted all of maybe 3 weeks before the weeds completely got away on me. Whoops! Between animals trampling my plants, fighting with the sprinkler to get everything watered, and my 2 year old deciding that every time we went outside he needed to run onto the road, the garden was a mess. But still growing!

Tomatoes, cucumbers and squash were basically growing themselves! I couldn’t pick them fast enough! I was picking daily, especially cucumbers. Then the green, wax and royal beans started to be ready and I was thrilled. They sure looked beautiful in a jar! Still fighting the weeds off but I really felt like the garden was producing amazingly. We had ears of corn almost ready, broccoli and cauliflower would be ready soon, potatoes and rutabagas looked promising.

And then I fell and broke 2 bones in my wrist, one of them shattered. So we had to go out of town for a week to have a metal plate surgically implanted. By the time we made it home there wasn’t much left. A stray cow had eaten all the corn, weeds were taller than most of the plants, and an infestation of some kind of flies had eaten all of the broccoli and cauliflower. Not that I was able to do any work in the garden at that time anyways, but it was a sad day for the garden. 

We had family volunteer to take the garden out early since I wasn’t able. So thankful for them! But that’s when we found out that all of the root vegetables had been all chewed up underground. We found maybe 15 potatoes that weren’t eaten already. The rutabagas got it the worst. And most of the onions were soft, some rotting in the ground. The beans would have done wonderfully except they had been neglected for too long so we just saved them to dry for seeds.

It was a sad end to the garden but we still did get an amazing amount of cucumbers, tomatoes and squash. We got a few dozen jars of pickles, some carrots, beans, beets, pickled radish, and a freezer full of tomatoes stored away. And we learned some lessons and have new ideas to try for the new season. Like starting dill early so it’s ready when the cucumbers are! And spacing the rows out much further so we can till between the rows, eliminating most of the weeding. I plan to also skip the root vegetables this year until I find a solution to that problem and focus on what we know grows well and that we want to preserve for our family.

We have one more year of knowledge and experiences under our belt now, I think that the 2021 season will be an amazing one! As I start to organize my seeds and make my plans, I know that this year will be an improvement and each year in the future will just get better and better.