With the current state of our garden, you might wonder why we are thinking about gardening in February. Usually, we do not start thinking about our garden until April or May until the stores start selling plants. Sometimes this isn't ideal - maybe the plants aren't any good, or you can't get what you want. We decided to do it ourselves - last year we added a greenhouse. If we want the plants to be ready for the garden, now is the time to start planting.
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We have a long history with DIY gardening. My parents always had a large garden and I wanted to continue this with my own family. Every home we have owned had a garden. Some successful, some not. We lucked out in our second home. Half the back yard was a garden with deep dark dirt that made growing vegetables easy. We also had flood irrigation to keep it well watered in the hot summer months. We grew strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, onions, potatoes, and the list goes on. We enjoyed this easy bountiful garden for seven years. Then came a number of moves and difficult gardening.
In Texas, we had little success due to the heat on our little garden box. Washington had a pretty short growing season - our tomatoes never turned red. Disappointment followed us to New York. Bad soil, rocks (Lots and lots of rocks!), too much rain or too little rain, bugs and diseases, these plagued us every season. Not to mention the darn animals. One year we actually got a cucumber plant far enough to harvest one beautiful cucumber. The deer also discovered this and ate all the rest of that plant by the next day. The squirrels and Mr. Woodchuck love tomatoes, but they only take a bite or two and leave the rest.
One year we did a bunch of research and tried growing the garden on the deck. We made special self watering buckets and planted all sorts of vegetables. The plants grew and seem to be doing well but for all the work we put into them we got little return. I think we harvested two or three carrots, a handful of potatoes, a few beans and tomatoes. At this point I had had enough and I told Mr. Folks I was done. We would just have to rely on local farmers markets for our vegetables.
Still, there is nothing quite like home grown vegetables. So, we finally decided to take one more stab at the garden. We spent last spring planning where and how we would build and fence it. Mr. Folks also decided to build the green house. Even though we started late and still had some struggles, it was the best garden we have had in years.
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(More to come on the garden design and build in a future post.)
The only thing left for us to do was start our own plants. We were too late to grow our own last year by the time we had everything built. If you want plants ready for May, you have to start earlier in the year getting the seedlings ready.
Happy Gardening!
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