Big Plans

The harvest is done; now it's time to start thinking about next year. Actually, we've been thinking about it for a while, but now we're doing something about it. Our gardens this year were bigger than anything we've tried before, and it was a good trial-and-error process that taught us quite a bit. Now, it's time to scale things up.

After doing some research and watching some videos on market gardening, we're putting together a much bigger garden that will easily provide for all our vegetable needs for the year. We've torn up the gardens we already had and plowed over them, creating a new space that we'll be planting our garlic crop next weekend. But there's a lot more space than that, and we'll be using that area to grow melons, pumpkins, squash, and so on. We left our berry bushes alone, since we're just starting to get some raspberries.

That's our small garden. The big one is a full fifty feet long and forty-eight feet wide, almost a square. It's going to hold sixteen raised beds, each fifty feet long, where we're going to plant most of our veggies. With the methods we're going to be copying from successful market gardeners, there's going to be a lot of veggies in that garden in the spring.

Another bonus is that my wife just used up a box of fresh peaches to make a nice rhubarb-peach compote. And we have the pits, about twenty-five of them. We've already got one peach tree growing, but now we're going to plant these pits this fall and see what comes of them in the spring. From what I've read about peach pits, they don't have the greatest germination rate, but even if we only get a couple of trees out of them it would be a nice addition to our mini-orchard. We're also going to be adding cherry trees, and if we can find some that grow here, some grapes.

It's crazy to think that just over a year ago, I had zero experience with farming of any sort; I couldn't even grow flowers in a pot. But now, I'm looking at growing a big pile of food for my family, with some leftover to donate or even sell. I'll have to work really hard at it, but then, that's part of being out here like this. And with the price of food going up and up and up, I have a feeling more people are going to start doing the same thing.

Ooh, there's an interesting idea. I wonder if anyone would be interesting in renting garden plots from us. We've got two big fields in the back of our property that might serve to do a community garden. Hmm...that's something to discuss with the wife. But I like the idea.