It’s the last day of April, and we’ve been hard at work on our spring garden and spring foraging. It’s been busy and fun, and as usual, hard work. We decided this year to expand the garden again (if you can really call last year an expansion – it was the first year we really did much at all). This expansion involved buying 5 new galvanized raised beds. The two larger ones went in the front of the house next to the driveway, where we unsuccessfully tried to have a “pumpkin patch” last year. The soil up there is dense, root-filled clay. We could have worked to amend the soil year after year, probably waiting for a while before getting any decent harvest. Instead, we opted to put some beds on top of the previous bed. We have a bunch of radishes growing in there now, with the hope that they’ll be ready to harvest by the time we’re ready to put some watermelon, eggplant, and squash in (which is like, really soon… might have miscalculated that one).
We also added 3 smaller galvanized beds to the back yard, which are full of carrot, beet, and turnip seedlings, along with some grow bags we’ll be using for potatoes.
We’re taking advantage of some little-used space up against the fence to put in a bed of flowers and one for zucchini, pumpkins, butternut squash, and spaghetti squash. It involved a cultivator, lots of stone picking, and the addition of potting soil.
And, we added one additional cedar raised bed in our existing garden area, along with a small greenhouse structure that was gifted to us, and a few additional planters. We went to a seed swap event where people donated seeds and you could make your own little packets to take home and plant. It was super cool, and so we’re trying a tonnnn more varieties this year than we did last year. But more on that later.
It’s all very exciting, but there’s a bit of guilt associated with it for me as well. One of the primary reasons, if not the actual primary reason we decided to get into gardening was to save money at the grocery store! And while we knew that the first year was going to be a big investment, we were hoping that year two would start us on the path to at least breaking even. But with the addition of the beds, planters, and grow bags, came the need for a delivery of soil, then the purchase of organic fertilizer and potting soil for some of the smaller areas. I can pretty safely say we’re not in the range where we might be breaking even this year.
I’m telling myself it’s okay, there are a lot worse hobbies to have. And the prices of vegetables at my local grocery store really are obscene. I’m also telling myself that “there really isn’t anything else big we’re going to have to buy after this year! Now that we discovered we do love gardening and wanted to expand, we can work with what we have!” Hopefully I’m not lying to myself, and will just spend a bunch of money on this next year as well. I don’t think that will happen… But I didn’t think that this year, either 🙂
Mark & Beth's Homegrown Adventure 