Garden Permutations

Here's a blog companion for our podcase post about our Garden Journey, but with some extra thoughts and ramblings sprinkled in.

Our garden has gone through many transformations since we've started this homesteading/farming journey. The irony of the fact that the gardening responsibilities of all of this has fallen to me isn't lost on me. I have mentioned my black thumb many times... and yet my husband still trusts me to take care of it.

We initially moved into a house with a small 8' x 10' fenced garden space. It was functional for the retired married couple that lived there prior to use, but with our growing family, it was okay for a few herbs and tomato plants, but not much else. This was fine enough for me because I was very pregnant, and then very shortly after, struggling with a newborn and didn't have the time or energy to establish a garden for the first year or two.

With a bit more time and energy under our belts, we decided to expand the garden into a 20' x 40' space, refenced the space and started planting more vegetables to sustain our family. I quickly discovered that while our dogs kept the deer away, we were still faced with all the damage that rodents and birds were inflicting on all that hard work. We tried putting up a lot of bird netting, deer netting... many types of netting, but didn't stop the damage other than to provide more tripping hazards for me. Fun observation, when we first moved to our country home, I took a walk around the property and was really tickled by the fact that the ground was covered in these little round pebble-y things. I commented that it was such unique dirt/ground/rocks all around.

"That's not dirt. That's rabbit poop," my husband explained to me. Oh. That was a lot of rabbits.

We had to get cats. Lots of cats. And as our dogs got bigger they also partook in the hunt, but it still wasn't unusual to see holes in various sizes showing up around the yard. We didn't set up traps and we didn't want to put out poison because of our cats and our kids. Also, as infuriating as it was to have rodents through the garden, they are a part of the natural ecosystem. Rodents for all their tunneling and root destroying and vegetable stealing, are aerating the ground. They are a food source for larger predators that keep the food chain healthy. We couldn't just decimate the population on our farm, but we were doing what we could to keep them out of our garden.

The following year, we attempted to maximize the growing space within the fenced area by putting in extra bathtubs that we found, and then I made deep bed garden boxes from some scrap metal around the property. Everything had a secure base of gopher wire, including newly planted trees. We put in extra space for corn and a pumpkin patch by letting the pigs till up a patch of dirt and manure it up. We ended up having to fence it off with chicken wire because some crows started hanging around and they gave me a bad feeling about what would happen if I left everything unattended.

And then we expanded again in our continuing project to get rid of our lawn. We added 20 foot rows of tomatoes and peppers and melons and added plastic mulch as a deterrent to Bermuda grass which... is a most amazing surviving grass. One that kept coming back again and again no matter how much I pulled and tilled and cursed and cried in frustration. It would grow up through cardboard and feet of organic material. It could not be choked out from the sun. It is ever pervasive and a testament to the strength of nature, but forever my garden nemesis.

We did find that the plastic mulch kept the grass at bay from choking out my plants, but because everything was covered unless a hole was specifically made for a plant, I couldn't just pop in little seedlings as they were available like I normally do throughout my garden. (I have these gardening plans on paper and in my head of neat little blocks of plant types, but because I repot and forget to label things and plant and forget to label things.... everything just get put willy-nilly and it's a guessing game as to what things will be. It does give a kind of wild look to the gardening space which I like, but it makes the planning just a little more chaotic because I can't remember which variety was more successful than another because I can't remember where they are. Also this makes seed saving a bit of a difficult endeavor because when you plant too many things that are related close to each other, they tend to cross-pollinate and you end up with some hybrid mish-mash of things in the next generation of planting. It's not always bad, but toxic squash syndrome is an actual thing, and it can make you very sick.

My future gardens include high tunnels and medicinal plants and herb gardens and just things that are beautiful because I've come to discover that even something that is solely there for the purpose of being pretty is beneficial. You want to be somewhere that is pretty. You want to work in a place that is aesthetically appealing to the senses. I think pragmatically, I'll still go with dual purpose flowers, or other pollinating plants, but the idea is that the garden is not only functional but performative as well. I've got to play with the soil and work on my aversion to heat. I have to be more active in weeding and just keeping everything from getting too wild in the summer. I have to build up a tolerance and just get in the habit of enjoying the sweat and the ache and the dirt encrusted under fingernails (I could try and wear gardening gloves more frequently, but I always lose them---I guess I could also get better at putting my things away properly. )

I am experimenting with permaculture gardens and food forest type environments in the lower orchard of our property. It came with the house and the fruit trees in it aren't exactly the most productive trees around. They struggle and manage to eke out a bit of something even with the drought, but it's so overgrown and ill-tended, I don't look forward to the hard work that would take to make it a flourishing place. We currently have turkeys in there now, that are eating down the weeds and fertilizing the ground with their manure, but there is much to be done. I'm sort of experimenting in that space with plants that I would like to encourage to grow wild with little to no encouragement (anything that is labeled as a "potentially invasive plant" I am happy to let grow wild) so that over time it can be a place that has both trees and mid-size shrubbery and ground cover that nourishes the soil and provides companions for all parts of the habitat within the perimeter of that space.

Every year the garden seems to manifest itself in a different way. We learn from our mistakes and we fail at some changes and grow and fail and grow in the same kind of cycle that the garden lives. It is humbling and elating and inspiring in all that it provides for us. What are you growing in your space? And what has the garden taught you?