This farm is really starting to come alive again. It had been a rental for 20 years before we got it. It sat empty for a year and it had not been loved right in many moons. We have been working so hard to make it everything we dream of. There is still a long way to go but everything is full of life again.
My garden is tidy and happy. I have added two in ground beds and I am really enjoying them. They are planted for a fall garden. I want to turn them into strawberry beds next year.
My ponies are do happy. I enjoy time with them almost every day. Having horses around again makes my heart happy. There is nothing as great as the smell of a horse. These ponies are friendly and sweet.
I'm learning to make flower crowns and its been a fun new craft.
We had an amazing fourth of July. Emma was home and it was wonderful to see her. She has graduated now and is planning on moving out of Grammy's soon. Lily is preparing for college applications. Max is too tall and it is almost painful. Quinny is the snuggle bug of the house and makes my heart sing.
Gus is starting to get older. He's not as fast and my heart aches to see him aging. I just love this man so much.
Max and I snuck out for some berry picking and he had to stop me from eating them all myself.
As soon as the seed catalogs start rolling in I want it to be spring.
I start sketching in my notebook and dreaming about tomatoes.
I spend about $5K in my mind and then I whittle it down. In the end I buy about 90% of what I want on impulse from my local farm store, missing out of the exotic varieties I picked in the seed catalogs.
I did place a small order to a company called Rare Seeds. I got the weirdest tomatoes varieties I could find. Of course, then I start making grand plans about saving my seeds next year. Like homemade Halloween costumes, I always intend to do this and just never actually do. Still, I try a few new gardening things every year year. Maybe this year it will be saving seeds.
As I as pondering my gardening history I started thinking back about my very early adventures into trying to grow stuff.
I started growing flowers back in my house in college, think 1999ish. I always loved gardening, but the thought of growing food really hadn't occurred to my brain yet. It all started around 2003 with a few un-staked and untended plain old red tomato plants in an empty spot next to the house. I didn't even eat tomatoes back then and I planted them to humor Josh.
Then in 2009 I got the bug for square foot gardening. I read the book and had my two 4/4ft beds with a 3ft/8 foot tomato bed. I learned a great deal about how to use my space in a garden and to not plant things in a traditional rows. It was a very obtainable little starting point.
Side note: I come from an endless line of gardeners. My father loves to garden, and he and I share a love for over reading and researching our gardening. I promise I have read more books about gardening than I did to get my master in nursing. My grandfather was a agronomy professor at Purdue and during the great depression had an apple farm in Canada. Generations further back had proper English gardens. As a child I remember my dad having me pick up a handful of some gorgeous Indiana soil and told me to smell it. I've taught my kids to do the same thing and I tell them, "It smells like magic". That black soil is impossible to not appreciate.
By 2010 I had fallen madly in-love with gardening and what it does for my soul. Eleven years ago I posted about it. (Damn, is this blog really that old?) I made the classic mistake of trying to start seeds my very first year. Spoiler - it didn't go well. I might have forgotten to water them for long periods of time.
By 2013 my original cottage garden was built and was so damn adorable. Look at that little cutie. She was my baby. Mulched aisleways with high tensile wire fencing. My handmade arbor. I look at this little garden and I just want to hug it. Cute little sweetie. You can see where my zinnia obsession started.
In March 2014 I did a blog post talking about how much I love gardening and how it completes my soul. By then I had the pretty little cottage garden and had added a huge back garden. I want to say it was 20ft by 120 ft. A beast of a garden. I had three large tomato beds. Two rows of blueberries and grapes. It was a beast of maintenance and I have to say, that it wasn't always kept to the best degree. The front garden was tidy and well tended, but the other gardens had a free and wild feel.
2015-2017 was more of the same. TONS are plants and strong starts, that would eventually get away form me. That's ok. Four kids, full time jobs, goats, and all the other things we had going in those days. I can't believe we were able to do all the things we did.
We had been living on our 18 acre farm at that point for 15 years. We liked that farm, but it had it's loopholes. Drainage got changed miles up stream and it was now in a flood plane. The barns would have two feet of water in them at times. Our oldest daughter had graduate high school and we felt no strong ties to that area any more. We wanted to move to what felt like home, the small town my husband had grown up in.
We bought a disaster house on five acres and I got to live my dream of doing a full house renovation. We bought it in November of 2016 and moved in to it August of 2017. The house had a full reno and you can read about it more on my blog. With that reno going wild, there was no chance to start a garden. I also knew that I needed time to get to know my new property before I put in my forever garden. I didn't want to rush this time. I wanted to plan and use my experiences to set things up as well as I could.
In 2018 I put some plants around the house and 1 row of tomatoes around the pre-existing greenhouse and shed. The soil on this property is terrible. Its a thin layer of poor soil over and foot of gravel. This all used to be a huge old dairy farm and this area was a barnyard full of cows on gravel. I could barely find a worm in the soil that first year.
By 2019 I was freaking out about needing a garden. I told Josh that I could not LIVE another year if I didn't get a garden (drama queen). I knew where I wanted it - near the greenhouse and water. Close to house to be enjoyed. There were still many projects with the house that needed center stage, but we did get the exterior fencing and some of the beds in. The clothes line still ran right through the middle of the garden at this time, and Otter was helping me hang clothes.
2020 was a year with lot's of pro's and con's but from a garden stand point it was AMAZING. We were on full house lock down at the start of gardening season. That is the best way to make sure the garden gets off to a good start. We added tons more soil, another large bed, and a corner animal pen. Why an animal pen in the garden? I like when my little creatures hang out with me when I am gardening. The pen is 9ft/9ft and is the perfect place for a few baby ducks or some rabbits to hang out. It makes me happy to putter around with little creatures being over loved during break times.
I put in a large pumpkin patch in another part of our property and squeezed too many tomatoes into every spot of earth that didn't have grass on it. Here in zone six, gardens are in insane mode by July.
This is a video walk through.
That long winding tale gets us up to date. Here I sit on a cold January evening in 2021 and I have garden dreams in my heart.
This is the map of my current garden. The green beds will be new beds this spring. Blue beds are beds that are already in place. This is going to give me a nice large area for me to play and play. (I'll still plant tomatoes all over the damn place.)
I have always wanted to learn to can, but was intimidated by the process. I started off the canning season by spending a day helping Jamie can salsa. She taught me the basics and helped me get a better understanding.
I have had such a great year in my garden that I couldn't let all those tomatoes go to waste. After getting my first canning lesson, I decided to toughen up and get myself going.
The first thing I canned was tomato paste. All jars sealed!!!
That got me going and I was ready to try some other things.
I didn't have a canning wrack, so I read up about how to make one from extra lids.
It's worked perfectly, but I will invest the $25 to buy one.
This season I have canned; tomato juice, paste, diced, and marinara sauce. I am making plans to convert our unusable old basement into a storage area for canned produce and a root cellar.
I still have hope of canning more juice and sauce this year.
I am really enjoying canning, it suits my hippy heart.
I am a wife, a mom, a nurse practitioner, a smart mouth, a professional party planner to only my own kids, a Disney crazy lady, a gardener, a mini-farmer, and a converted spoiled brat.
