One of the things with this homestead journey that we try to show is that we truly don’t always know what we are doing. Surprise right?!?! Our main goal is to learn from everything. We are pushing ourselves to try new things all the time. From animals, to building, to the garden, it is all a learning curve. With that we are taking the time to do updates so we too may see the progress through out the year. But also at this point with the garden I would like to learn from what I try this year!
We started off this year by trying our hand at seed starting. That ended up with many leggy plants. To which we did manage to save a lot of our tomato plants but we still didn’t have the chance to save all of them. We really were hoping this route would have done a little better for us. Who knows though we may pick up on this attempt next year but we will wait and see how the rest of the plant year goes. Let me also add we are learning this all in a new planting zone. This is our first year planting at this house.
From this we have gathered that we prefer to direct sow into the raise garden beds. It seems to have produced thicker stalks on all the plants. We also tried planting everything at one time. I have now realized that next year I will be succession planting my plants. Now I know I will be able to use the vegetables up for canning purposes but I think if we time it better we can make it that not everything will pop up at once. This year we will just be doing lots of big batches of canning.
Lastly I have realized I am such a planner with the garden but I need to do I the planning while sitting out in the garden. I had a whole plan in place then when I got into the garden I managed to completely scrap the ideas and went for a new plan. It turned out amazing but next time I need to be outside and just dream it out! Make a plan yes but I need to do so while dreaming.
From all of this we are now at the point where I have a few to dos left for the garden. I need to tie up the tomato plants, plant some herbs, fertilize the garden, and pull my potting bench into the garden. It’s not a lot but its definitely a decent chunk of time that I need to work on it. I’m thinking if I find the time I could easily do this in a weekend. I try to get all of the garden work done in the morning so that I don’t damage anything in the sun. The morning is also the perfect temperature for myself to break a sweat! Hopefully soon I can get these all finished! Oh and before I forget! Today we had our first tomato show up on the vine! I’m so excited!