This year’s garden was a complete failure. It’s mostly my own fault. Successful gardening, like anything else, requires time and effort, and I just didn’t put in enough. And the deer, for some reason, decided to use our gardens as their own buffet. Even my dependable blueberries were eaten by the deer, forcing us to go to neighboring farms to pick and freeze some for the winter.
Even though I spent time in the garden, it just wasn’t enough to combat the weeds, the drought, the wildlife. If I spent my time weeding, I didn’t have time to water. If I spent time watering, I didn’t have time to weed. It was a constant push and pull to try and fit in a lot of work into a small amount of allocated time. To say that this growing season was fraught with frustration is an understatement. I tried enlisting help from Husband and the children, but it was difficult to direct them to accomplish a vague list of tasks: “weed that spot, but not that one because the plants aren’t marked”… “water every other raised bed”… “mulch the tomato plants that you can barely see because the deer nibbled them nearly to the ground”… They tried, but unless I was present and giving specific directions, things just didn’t get done.
So this fall we’re revamping the garden. We actually tried halfway through the growing season to move everything that was still alive to a space inside our fenced in back yard, thinking that we’d move the vegetable garden there. But the plants growth stunted and we’d have to clear a lot of trees and work a lot of soil to make the space work well as a garden. It’s feasible, but we are blessed to have other options.
I have been asking for a tiller for about 10 (14?) years. Most of our land had never been used for growing before (except for the hidden field in the woods), and while I love reading about no till methods, we need to do some work on our garden beds no matter where we put them. We have a large tractor and very large tiller (long story) but it’s really meant for full scale farming and is just too big to use in the garden. I finally convinced Husband that the garden would always be a battle if we didn’t prep the soil correctly, and he agreed that getting a smaller tiller made sense.
One day last week Husband and I asked a neighbor who sells and repairs small machinery if he had a tiller available. He didn’t have one, and said they’re so very hard to come buy these days that he wasn’t sure when he’d get one in. That was on a Saturday. Monday morning our neighbor called my husband and said he had a barely used tiller that just came in. Our neighbor looked it over, serviced it, changed the oil, and we bought it from him hours later. What Providence.
Now that we have a plan, we’ve been spending every nice day outside trying to reclaim some land for growing. We had some weeds to tackle, some brush to be removed, some trees that needed to be felled. But working together we’re getting it done. And we may be purchasing a greenhouse from another neighbor. We’re trying to decide on fencing – permanent or seasonal/movable. If we get the greenhouse, where should we put it? Our land is very sloped, so we need to work with terraces and they need attention.
I’m so excited to have a workable plan. I have garlic that’s ready to plant as soon as the time and soil is right, and I’m looking at some ideas for beds and walkways so that it’s all clearly marked (one of my children has a tendency to only walk ON my plants instead of next to them).
I think next year’s garden will be so much better having it set up and ready to go as soon as the soil warms for planting. Too often we’re playing catch up in the spring after not getting to the garden clean up in the fall, but now I have high hopes for next year.