Careful What You Wish For

I might even grow celery! Boy, were those famous last words! When I wrote them in the last blog post, I had no idea what was in store for us.

It all started innocently enough. Just a few plants to start from seed…

Ok, maybe just a few more…

Not everything germinates or survives the seedling stage, so I made sure to plant lots of seeds. Plus, I had some old stock that I wasn’t sure was good anymore, and some mystery seed saved from previously grown squash. (Note to self: Must label seeds with type and date!). I popped a bunch of seeds into my handcrafted seed starter mix but didn’t hold my breath. Yet, success! Except for my parsnip, almost everything germinated and thrived under grow lights donated by friends. This meant I had 47 tomato seedlings, 36 storage onions, 25 leeks, 16 squash, and a dozen or so herbs, peppers and flowers. Oh, and about 70 celery seedlings!!!

Of course, all these seedlings required a large amount of dirt.

All this dirt had to be shoveled by hand and lugged by wheelbarrow to fill the garden area. All 60 cubic yards of it. But we felt we had to do it because, well, just think of all those cute little seedlings needing a summer home! Also, our yard was hard packed clay with very little topsoil - it would have been impossible to grow veggies without amendments.

To extend our growing season, we researched greenhouses and raised beds and settled on covered raised beds this year. Darwin built five ‘tomato chuckwagons’ as he called them and we filled them with dirt. They worked out really well, and tomatoes are still producing now.

Once we moved all that dirt and amended it with compost, sheep manure and worm castings, it was time to plant seeds directly into the garden and transplant all those seedlings. You can imagine it took awhile! We also were worried about rabbits and deer, so we constructed row cover tunnels to protect the garden and encourage early growth. These also came in handy later in the summer when the temperatures skyrocketed and everything baked under a remorseless sun.

Ugh, it was so hot and smoky for weeks. Our old trailer turned into a tin oven. We survived by fleeing to our closed in porch with an AC unit in the window, sitting with the animals and sucking on homemade fruit popsicles. Our garden survived sheltered under row covers with the ends open for air flow. Once the heat abated a little, the harvest started to come in at the end of June. We were so excited! In the span of a couple of weeks, we had more food than we managed all summer from our Cochrane garden. The harvest kept coming… and coming… and coming…!

We had lots of garden helpers along the way.

And some not so helpful companions!

The garden morphed from a part-time hobby into an almost full-time endeavour. We know the effort and work is not for everyone, and there were more than a few moments when I cried aloud, “What have I done??”. In the end though, we’ve enjoyed a summer of fresh eating and feel more secure with full freezers and pantries. Hopefully next year will be less labour intensive as we get our soil healthier and our water systems more efficient.

I’d say we almost - but not quite - bit off more than we could chew with this garden project.