Don’t Give Up On Your Gardening

Hi guys I think I had about 15 little mini heart attacks. My teenager’s driving me around.  Tell you what, he’s not a bad driver, but I just don’t do this part very well. He needs to practice, and I’m having drive to the bank because he got his first paycheck from his new job. So, he’s cashing his check.  That’s always exciting.

And, I’m having him drive me to Michael’s because Michael’s has a sale on their photo boxes, which I like to put my seed packets in, and I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in a moment, showing you kind of how to get your seeds organized – now – for upcoming, you know, seed starting and garden season and why you should seed start.  It’s just too expensive to go buy a couple plants at your big box stores, sorry. 

A lot of people get really intimidated about starting seeds. A seed has everything it needs to germinate and one of my favorite things I used to do with my first graders was we would do seeds in a jar. We would use wet paper towels to show them what the seeds look like as they germinate. The main thing is once your seeds germinate, they have everything they need.   All they need is having good soil for them to continue to grow and then they need warmth and light, and, of course, water.  It’s a process figuring out what that is. 

You can do it pretty affordably and I’m hoping to take some of the intimidation away. The worst thing that happens is you fail, but they won’t all fail, and I think that’s what people don’t realize.   Expect some failure when you start plants from seed, especially if you haven’t done it before.

Getting Seeds Organized – Photo Boxes 

Michael’s had photo boxes on sale, and these are normally about 40 plus dollars.  I know they also sell them on Amazon, but I think they were pretty high. They carry them at Michael’s, and they have clear ones, and they have these kind of blue color ones, and they have multiple color ones.  Lots of choices are available. These are actually for storing printed photographs, or if you do film and have negatives (anyone remember those?) or something like that and they are archival safe. That’s typically what photo boxes are for, but if you’ve ever been on YouTube you will have seen these because pretty much every gardener uses these to put their seed packs. 

I could get two more of these because they were on sale for 14.99 because what happened to me last year with my boxes were I didn’t have  enough boxes for what I was planting, ANd, what I originally thought was with one box it was going to be for vegetables and fruit and when I say fruit I mean like tomatoes and green beans – those are technically fruits – and that my colorful box was going to be for flowers, and I think maybe herbs.  What I found is I ended up sharing boxes with everything, and I didn’t have anywhere near enough for my vegetable and fruit gardening seed packs, and so then what ended up happening is I would take some out, I’d plant and have a big bowl that I would just put all of these half used, sometimes all the way used packs in in my bowl; sometimes I would have bigger packs that don’t necessarily fit in these that I get from the Feed and Seed.  Zipper peas usually I would put them in a mason jar with a lid for storage for longer term storage.  But as gardening season went on, this became very disorganized.  I also didn’t want to throw my empty packets away.   

Small Example of Growing 

Israeli melon 

This was the first melon I grew successful.  It’s very similar to a cantaloupe.  They were really tasty, but they spoil quickly, so you have to kind of be mindful because they produce like crazy.  We couldn’t eat them fast enough before they went bad, so my chickens actually got a lot of these.  We did get some, and I was able to share some.  Mostly, my chickens got a lot of the melons. 

Sugar Pie Pumpkin 

This was the first pumpkin I grew successfully.  I’ve been trying for years to grow a pumpkin successfully, and everyone I’ve tried to grow I’ve been overwhelmed with squash bugs.  I just haven’t had the success and I had with these.  I actually processed and had the pumpkins put up; they’re in my freezer and I use them to make muffins and oatmeal bakes and things like; I held onto the pack because I need to go back through and make notes of the things I planted last year.    

Keep up with what you plant 

What I did not like because we planted a lot of different varieties of different things, and you know which ones grew well, which ones didn’t, which one maybe had some more issue with blight or powdery mildew or what have you or maybe just some of the varieties of tomatoes, and you just didn’t think they had a lot of flavor. So, I held on to these so that I could go back through and kind of do my recap and make my notes ,and so I knew I had all this I wanted to get it organized. 

I really wanted to already be working on this, but I got ill, and I’m a little behind, but I’m not that far behind, and it’s going to be okay. I went over, like I said, to the Michaels. I got two more of these boxes so that I can kind of revamp this whole thing get it a little bit better organized so that I can go through my open seed packs or empty seed packs, and I can take my handy dandy legal pad and  make my notes. 

With my notes, I can plan for this coming year, and you know as to what’s working, what didn’t work, and what’s maybe something new I want to try. I want to encourage you that if you are thinking about having a garden or you’ve already gardened before whether it be on a very small scale, if it’s only in containers or if you are thinking about going a little more grandiose guess.  

Basic Horticulture Class and How I knew what I did with my seeds 

About 18 months ago I started taking some college classes at my local community college for Horticulture science, and the first class I took was just a basic Horticulture science class that was pretty informative was very helpful and a lot of it I knew because when you teach first grade science you learn a lot of the basics, but there were other things that I did learn that I didn’t necessarily know. I’m glad I took it I wanted to show you my master copy of my front garden that we built back in 2021 and what I did was I it’s I drew. I left everything blank. This is just my master copy. It shows where the beds are and how it looks and where you come in I have rose bushes and things that are marked on here. I have planters outside because when we designed this Garden, and we designed it to have Planters and also a on this side we have our muscadine Vines. This was all done to keep the deer out. I have a fence, but it’s a shorter fence and so essentially this is like the two fence approach, and I planted things like Lantana, Rosemary, Lavender – all those kinds of things, and the deer hate them they absolutely hate them. They have never gotten into this Garden even though the fence is five foot tall and so this has worked beautifully, and it’s pretty because of all the Lantana and flowers and brown-eyed Susans. Tak this butterfly bush. It just attracts so many pollinators, and so this is my master Garden plan for my front garden. 

Now, I have overlays and I have copies of this from last year and what I planted where because even if you have if you’re gardening in containers or in raised beds you still want to practice some crop rotation, moving things around. You have to be aware like in this gardening. As a matter of fact I’m developing where I have more and more perennials in this Garden this may eventually become totally a perennial garden for me, but you have to know if you can companion plant that with X, Y, or Z, so having your master copy that you can just photocopy year after year and you can plan out each Garden season what you want to put in there or if you don’t want to put anything in there or if you have a perennial that stays in there or what have you.  

I totally recommend that you draw that out. Now you may look at this and you may say that’s a massive Garden. I don’t have that big of a garden. Well to be very honest with you, where I live I have lived for 26 years, and we built this Garden in 2021, the spring of 2021, and I did have a raised bed garden prior to this, but it was nowhere near to this size. When I started gardening when we first moved here our biggest issue we had was sunlight, and so sunlight was a big issue and the only time we really could Garden was in the summer, and in our front yard. Yes, the very front yard and we always had struggles and issues with deer and them eating our Harvest, the weeds and I got really frustrated and very overwhelmed that I just couldn’t manage it. 

A New Plan 

I kind of was ready to give up gardening and then about 12 years ago my neighbor next to my next door neighbor at the time had discovered a new way of gardening called Square Foot Gardening, and he let me borrow his book and I devoured it. I was fascinated at the premise that you could grow a lot of food in a very small space. Now am not I telling you that you can grow a Year’s worth of food in a 5×5 bed; no. That’s ridiculous but you can actually grow a lot to supplement your family in a relatively small space, if you plant it correctly. I will leave a link to their  website, Square Foot Gardening and pretty much any information you want to know would be there. I can also link the book. It’s a great resource to have on your shelf. They even have tools you can get so that you can put down what you’re planting. It has the different things and how far apart you know a bean would get planted versus a cabbage or whatnot, but that really helped me fall back in love with gardening, and when I started I literally had torn out by my front stairs a flower bed that I had and that became my new garden. I gardened it every summer, and we had wonderful tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and beans, and I did this in a little five by five garden bed right next to my front porch.  

But, because it was so close to my house we really didn’t have a lot of struggles with the deer and stuff like that. I was able to manage to keep all that safe. I absolutely loved it and I did that for several years. Around that time my son started at our local university, he was a microbiology major, and he focused a lot in food science and did a lot of experiments with food science at his college. They actually have a working farm, and he worked on the farm, did work with bees and different things with trees and stuff like that. 

New Beds 

My son knew that I had this gardening passion. When he came home in that summer, he built me six more raised beds they were all in my front yard. We fenced them in and this is pretty much what I gardened in for about 10 years. I would try cool weather crops and the like but typically by the spring in Georgia everything’s going to bolt. And, I tried many times in the fall to get things to grow, but it didn’t necessarily work because I would run out of the of daylight, because our house would be shadowed.  

New Light 

 Our sun patterns and everything else was heavily “treed” and then we had 2020 happen and we were offered the land at a good price, a little over half an acre behind us and half an acre on the side of us. The lots were not buildable, they were full of sweetgum trees that were that were sick and needed to come down, and so even though we were getting a great deal on the price of the land and the closing and all the finances. There was a huge investment.  

We had to remove the trees. But we weighed all the cost and felt like it was still going to be a good investment for us because we were going to take that land and put it into our current land and home so we have a larger acreage with our home. So that’s what we did ,and when we removed those trees we all of a sudden had all the light we could ever want and we always knew we had a purpose that we would replant. Trees are very important but I wanted trees with a purpose. The trees that had been there were pre-civil war and they had lived their lifespan and I wanted to plant trees with a purpose that could feed us or people who would come after us. That would be a blessing or that they could feed Wildlife or all the above. So that’s kind of what we have been doing and it also allowed us to be able to grow our Gardens because that was what John and I both wanted. We both had grandparents who were gardeners or farmers and it’s just something that we love to do and the older that we have gotten the more we’re drawn to that and so that’s what we do. So yes this is a pretty good sized garden, and I have the other one that we built last year in the backyard and we’re going to expand on that this in this coming spring and we’re excited about that. It gives us more opportunities and because at some point I think it would be really neat if I could have some kind of a small market share Garden or I don’t even know if it could possibly at some point be a Ministry maybe for people in need I just don’t know I don’t know what doors God is going to open and close in that. I just know this is what I’m supposed to be doing and so that is what I am working towards.  

This drawing on my garden (see download) is nothing too fancy, and I can like I’ll take a photograph of it so that you can see it I just drew it out. I did use some of the tools from taking the landscape design class, but basically you need a good pencil with a good eraser. This is card stock and I used I guess it’s like a drafting ruler kind of thing. I like it better than just your traditional ruler. 

Don’t Give Up Gardening 

If you Garden long enough, you are eventually you’re going to want more Garden space and there’s nothing wrong with that. You just have to realize it’s a lot of work and you don’t want to over plant a space if you’re not going to be able to maintain it throughout the whole growing season. And, not only not just maintain, but are you going to be able to use what you get? Are you going to be okay if you plant and you’ve spent this money an investment and it’s a bust because there are years where it’s just a bust? 

That’s just part of gardening so those are things to take into account and that’s why I would recommend if you’re starting out it’s better to start small start with a bed start with a GreenStalk or two or something similar to that. Start trying to have success with that. If you have success with that then, you kind of go out from there. In fact, you may want to start with flowers; you know flowers a lot of times are easy. You can do those in planters in beds by your house and a lot of times you can enter a plant in those same beds to a tomato plant or a cucumber plant. Maybe you grow vertically. There’s a lot of things like that that you can do. But either way you still want to have something drawn out so that you can keep a record of your space, and like I said, what you planted and then kind of do the recap of this worked, this didn’t work, and then the following season you will know, “Okay well I planted sugar snap peas on the trellis, on this trellis I planted cucumbers, so this year I want to move that around. I think I want this to be a green bean trellis” Do not give up. 

(adapted from the video)