Hello! I’m going to deviate from my normal sewing stuff today to talk about my garden.
I have been going back and forth about whether or not I would talk garden on my site. It is my peace, it is my therapy, it is my quiet place away from the internet. But I think that is exactly the reason I want to share it with you guys. I love you guys and I love my garden, so I want to share this beautiful haven with you all.
I have been gardening for the last ten years. We were in and out of rentals and apartments for the better part of those ten years. Sometimes we were lucky enough to garden in a rental house with a yard and sometimes we would garden at friend’s houses when we lived in apartments.
Now we are on year two as home owners and also second-year garden in our backyard. Over the last two years I have kept a journal of all my experiments, successes, and even (especially) my failures in the garden. Each success and failure in the garden, as in anything, is an extremely valuable learning experience.
So here is a little walk through my garden as it is today and then I will get into the winter garden that we are currently getting underway.
Raspberries
I have ALWAYS wanted to grow bramble fruit, particularly raspberries. I told my husband, I don’t care about jewelry, just help me plant raspberries and I will be happy. And I tell you what, no truer statement has been uttered. I LOVE my raspberry hedge!
Bare Root Plants
We planted these last year. I bought our raspberries from Grow Organic an organic nursery in California. I normally buy all of my seeds locally (within 100 miles) because plants do much better in the climate where their parents grew up and adapted to. Having said that Grow Organic was the only place I could find that sold affordable and organic raspberries. They have done tremendously well in our east Tennessee environment even though they were not cultivated locally.
We started with fifteen plants from Grow Organic and two from our local nursery Knoxville Seed. The Grow Organic plants came dormant with roots in wet wood shavings in a box. Their instructions said that as long as they were dormant you could simply “slip them in”. This means to keep the roots in a bucket of sawdust and soil until you are ready to plant them. If leaves started to grow then it would be imperative to get your plants in the ground with haste!
Unfortunatly, when my raspberries first arrived the warm journey to our house had taken the little plants out of dormancy and they were already producing leaves! The clock was ticking, we were in a hurry!! I was pregnant at the time so Chris was doing most of the heavy work in the garden. We miscommunitcated about the size the raspberry bed needed to be. I realized that the bed was one foot too narrow the whole length of the row. It might not seem so big of a deal but with our raspberry plants already soaking in a bucket of water to prepare them for planting. Raspberry plants can only soak like this for about an hour. We had no time to spare and needed to get that bed ready immediately.
Meanwhile, both of our neighbors had dropped off their children and some of their friend’s children in our backyard. As the children played, Chris turned over the soil and I shook the dirt from the upturned sod. We were making very little progress this way when it hit me, “I have about 15 kids in my back yard, 35 feet of bed to shake the soil from the sod, and 2 pints of ice cream in the freezer!”
“I’ll give ice cream to anyone who wants to help us finish this garden bed!” I told the kids!
All the kids came running to help. The bed was widened and all the kids were contentedly eating ice cream in under a half an hour.
Everytime I look at our beautiful raspberries I think about that fun scramble.
Of the fifteen Grow Organic raspberry plants we only lost two and that was a drop in the bucket because this past summer, 2019, the raspberry hedge, as you can see pictured above, has taken over!!!
Garlic
If you’ve never grown garlic it is really something you should consider! Garlic is so fun, so easy, and so rewarding to grow. In late fall, when it starts to get cold all you have to do is gently break apart a head of garlic into individual cloves, plant them point up in a hole twice their height, mulch liberally and wait for spring!
What you are left with is a tremendous amount of garlic!
Right now I am doing an experiment and have been stratifying some heads of garlic (aka I stuck them in the freezer to simulate winter). Since winters are so warm here I am going to see if I can trick my garlic into growing through the winter season for an early spring harvest. I kept them in the freezer during summer and will be planting them in the coming weeks to see if they will now do the bulk of their growing in our warm east Tennessee winter. It never hurts to try so we’ll see!
Butternut Squash
I’m just going to be honest here and say that this was probably one of my laziest garden years yet. I had a baby last year and that always comes first for obvious reasons. Having said that, I think my beautiful and generous garden knew I was busy taking care of a baby because it delivered in spite of my neglect!!
I did not plant a single squash or pumpkin seed this summer but, boy-howdy, did they grow!! I am still harvesting squash from volunteers and I am so happy and thankful for this wonderful gift of food!
All in all it was a great second year garden.
I am in the process of planting my first ever winter garden which I am SO excited about! Stay tuned for more on that. The soil is really improving. I have mostly done Back to Eden gardens (woodchip gardening) and I have recently been doing a lot of research about Ruth Stout (deep mulch) gardens. More on that to come.
Let me know in the comments, do you like gardening? Is this something you’d like to hear more about or should I just stick to sewing?