Garden tour (long) (with pictures!)

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Originally Posted by kib

How long is your gardening season? Do you use hoop houses in winter? It looks so beautiful there, but how long is the "brown and gray period"? (I want your summer climate - All year. :~))

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We're zone 5b. Last frost this year was first week of May and USDA says we're frost-free by May 15th but I've been told by those wiser than me to plan on June 1st for putting tomatoes out ;)

There will be snow on the ground by Christmas but it won't be terribly bad until then... of course, that's all relative. We moved here from Minneapolis and I was raised in upper Michigan (snowed on the 4th of July one year there!). We are going to try hoops with greenhouse plastic and frost cover to grow spinach, kale and beets year-round. I think I'll try cloches for some tomatoes next year too and see what happens.

Looks really great and puts my 6 raised beds to shame - have you kept a tally of what you've spent on fence, wood, soil, etc.?? Do you know how to can/freeze or have you taken any classes?

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Originally Posted by Float On

Looks really great and puts my 6 raised beds to shame - have you kept a tally of what you've spent on fence, wood, soil, etc.?? Do you know how to can/freeze or have you taken any classes?

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Yep. We've kept a tally on those... but not on the hours spent (although I could probably ballpark that pretty close). We should come out ahead over buying groceries by next year but maybe actually by the end of this year.... not counting the time spent. Of course, that's been nothing but a really good workout program and we're not even paying a gym!

We'll be relying on DW's grandma to help us with learning to can. She's done it for umpteen years and wants to pass on the craft so to speak :)

beautiful! it's so lovely to see your hard work making something so beautiful and abundant! :)

Thank you so much for taking the time to share all those wonderful pictures! All the work you've done is inspiring and all that green makes me want to get out of the desert. Everything looks like it is really coming along well so I know you will have many wonderful harvesting days ahead. Keep us posted.

Good on you for all that hard work in such a short amount of time! Wow! I need to show my husband.

Look forward to more photos later!

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Originally Posted by KayLRZ

Good on you for all that hard work in such a short amount of time! Wow! I need to show my husband.

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If that's the lead-in for a new honey-do list, he's not going to be happy with me! :D

So, on to some of the goofs....

Well, the most obvious one is that we bit off a lot without a lot of experience. It's been pretty successful so far, but I'm half-convinced that a bit of luck is involved with that. We've read and researched a ton and we have some old hands to turn to for advice, but I wouldn't recommend starting this big. I had a very specific goal when we started (80% of our food from our garden within 3 years) which led to a bigger plot, but it would have been smarter to start smaller.

We started things way too early. We started a bunch (probably 600) seedlings indoors. Surprisingly good luck with most of them (marigold being the biggest exception, could not get that going to save our life). However, we were starting the seedlings with no home for them to move to. As a result, a good number of things ended up outside late. We potted up the tomatoes twice but still had them in their pots too long. They seem to be coming along ok outside but time will tell (the worst one of the bunch being the san marzano tomatoes.... which actually look to be doing better post-deer attack).

We didn't get the beneficials out in time. Everything would have been a lot better off if we had gotten our marigolds and dill out in our beds when we first planted everything else. These would have attracted more predators to take on the various pests we've been fighting. Floating row cover over the broccoli beds have been a huge help, but some more wasps would have been nice as well :)

We didn't adequately protect our garden early on. We have a flock of deer out back... and raccoons and woodchucks and rabbits. We had a deer come through and munch things pretty well (thankfully everything but one pepper plant recovered) because it never occurred to us that it'd just take the steps up that we hadn't blocked off.

We went seed crazy. To be honest, when you're buying seeds and another variety or another veggie is only $1-$3 for a pack of seeds, it's hard to not just impulse shop. We have a lot of varieties to try this year to see what we like, but that also means that I'm not going to be able to (easily) save some seeds to replant next year. I guess I'll get some practice in on isolating blooms and hand-pollinating, if I'm up for it, but it's going to be a hassle... on the plus side, we have gobs of seeds saved for next year still.

We bit off too many things at once. The only thing that really suffered from this were the blueberries. For now, we settled on up-potting them and they're going to live in containers for this year. I just have not had enough time to get an area prepped for them in the backyard (near a wetlands area that'll be perfect for them).

and some of the benefits...

We used to go through one of those 10oz clamshells of spinach a week from the grocery store. We now have about twice that amount of spinach every week and we're not wasting packaging to get it.

DW couldn't stand snap peas from the store but loves the ones out of the garden

This has also led to simpler cooking. I made a huge batch of rice at the start of the week and we've enjoyed several spinach and snap pea stir fries. Between things like that, the salads, and simple things like baked potatoes with chives from the garden, my loaded cost for many of our meals is now under $1 for the two of us.

Food waste, to some degree, has always been a problem here. When you're cooking for two, it can be hard to use up all of, say, the celery you buy at the store. But, when you're only harvesting a bit of what you need when you need it, it's been easier to keep things from being wasted. I've found that I'm more invested in using it all too when I put the work into growing it.

The biggest, bestest benefit though, has been how useful gardening has been as exposure therapy for my wife... which she wouldn't mind me sharing with you all. She has OCD and one of the best ways to overcome it is a part of cognitive behavioral therapy called exposure response therapy. In a nutshell, one can sort of reprogram their brain to accept things again by small and increasing exposures. For my wife, one of her obsessions was around contamination and one was around harm. At the height of things, she was unable to walk in the yard because of obsessions that a rabid animal might bite her. Now, she's fearlessly (and without pausing to obsess at all) tromping and digging all through the garden. In the past, anything on her food would have caused her to not eat it. Now, if she runs across a slug, the slug gets tossed aside and the food just goes in the harvest bowl for dinner.

This was awesome to view and read!

Please continue to share photos, and of your harvested/canned food as well! My gardening experience has been less than satisfactory this year so I'm living vicariously through others' gardens at the moment. :|(