We moved to the glacial sands of southwest Michigan after three years of gardening in the unforgiving clay of a West Virginia mountaintop. Our time would have been better spent cultivating a more modest growing space that we could have scaled up over time. Overextending ourselves at the beginning led to a lot of wasted seeds, tilling, and bed prepping last year with little to show for it in the long run. This means that we’ve struggled to reclaim the unused spaces from weeds this year because we didn’t bother to maintain them in the middle of last season. We planted less than half of our available garden space the first year, and more than a quarter of our seed varieties never even made it into the ground. So many plant descriptions in seed catalogs were calling my name, and we purchased far more varieties than we could hope to master in a single season.Ĭompounding the problem, we were turning hardpacked hayfields into a garden space, which meant our first year was spent dealing with a dense mass of weedy roots that took the entire growing season to eliminate fully. When we first started planning out our garden, overenthusiasm got the best of us. Learn from our mistakes, and you’ll be that much closer to getting your garden into peak production mode. It turns out that setting up our own garden was a vastly different experience than growing for others on established organic farms, and I learned a lot about plant maintenance in the process.īelow, I’ll go through some of our biggest lessons from the past two years. In many ways, I’ve realized my dream of eating homegrown produce throughout the year, but it hasn’t been without some herculean effort-and a lot of failures along the way. Now we are in our second growing season on the property. In all, the space measures approximately 50 feet by 100 feet, for about 5,000 square feet of gardening space. We settled on an eastern patch of exhausted hay field, tilled it up, and bordered it with five-foot fencing. The first step was choosing a space on our 34-acre property that was close enough to the house for easy access without the risk of being shaded out by the tall maples that lined the drive. We dreamed of freezers filled with greens, a pantry piled high with preserved tomatoes, and enough pumpkins and butternut squash to supply us in creamy soups throughout the year. When my husband and I moved to our southwest Michigan homestead in the winter of 2018, one of the first priorities was establishing a massive garden.
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