week 21: the big garden, season 2
this week on the little dream farm
Chris and I both agree that our love language is food.
You can get straight to our hearts with something really good to eat.
So this year, getting the Big Garden up and running felt like a romantic date.
First we headed over to our favorite organic nursery in Vermont where we got to ogle over all the delicious fruits and veggies we want to eat this summer and through the winter months (for the things we can store or preserve). Next we got to pick out all the starts and gather a nice big haul of our ready-to-plant edible garden. Then once we got everything back home, it was time to prep the garden!
Last year, we were pretty overwhelmed by this giant garden that was overgrown with weeds and never felt like we really got ahead of through the season. Being so new to gardening and totally new to growing food, the learning curve was steep even though I’d spent the winter months with my nose in books and blogs and YouTube videos learning as much as I could before the growing season began. Knowing is definitely not the same as doing!
This year, though, we walked into getting the Big Garden up and running with total ease. We did a few key things differently this year—how I’d ideally wanted to manage this garden space all along, but took us going through the motions to figure it out and get to this place.
First, we cleared the garden at the end of the growing season. We then gathered a ton of leaves from around the yard and mulched those and placed them over the entire garden as a nice thick layer of mulch to keep the moisture in the soil and keep it covered in the winter months.
As the weather warmed, we then went out and threw tarps down over the beds and covered those with rocks and old wood planks. Keeping the beds covered in this way was an essential step in getting ahead of the weeds (but doing it at the start of winter would not have allowed all the winter snow to soak into the soil).
Once we pulled the tarps back on Friday, we had mostly weed-free beds that only needed to be weeded around the edges. We raked all the leaf mulch to the edges of the beds to create a weed barrier, took a bed preparation rake through the beds, and we were ready for planting!
This really felt like a huge garden win for us—one we’re proud of and happy we’d had a season of learning to get to this place!
Next up on this date was the fun part—laying out where everything would go!
Once that was all figured out it was planting time. Last year, I laid out and planted the Big Garden myself. This year, Chris did the entire process alongside me and learned how to do all of the bed preparation, layout and then he learned how to plant everything this go around, too! We both enjoyed eating and cooking from the garden so much last year that this year we got to get it up and running together, which I know Chris is going to now appreciate so much more when he sits down to enjoy this year’s harvest knowing how he nurtured those little plant starts from wee babies into giant plants that produce for us all season long!
I really enjoy the peace and quiet of spending time alone in the garden, but getting the Big Garden going together this year was way more fun and more memorable than doing it on my own. We said that each year on the Friday before Memorial Day, we’d like to make it a tradition to go get our starts, prep the garden, and get everything in the ground together. Now that’s a worthy tradition to keep alive!!
Here’s a list of what we’ve got growing in the edible garden so far this year:
Big Garden Fruits and Veggies:
-Cantaloupe
-Melon
-Crimson sweet watermelon
-Butternut squash
-Acorn squash
-Scallop sunburst squash
-Pumpkins
-Benary’s ornamental gourds
-Super sweet 100 tomato
-San Marzano tomato
-Grape tomato
-White cherry tomato
-Japanese black trifele tomato
-Little fingers eggplant
-Barbarella eggplant
-Lunchbox sweet mixed pepper
-Escamillo sweet pepper
-Pepperoncini
-Slicing cucumber
-Pickling cucumber
-Midori giant edamame
-Sugar snap peas
-Celery
-Lacinato kale
-Swiss chard
-Cabbage
-Red cabbage
-China gold napa cabbage
-Winterbor kale
-Red ace beets
-Shallots
-Candy onion
-Red onion
-Leeks
-Cauliflower
-Broccoli
-Baby rose red potatoes
-Yukon gold potatoes
In addition to the Big Garden we have a small apple orchard David planted several years ago with his favorite apple trees. Additionally, there are two pear trees, three plum trees, and a host of blueberry and raspberry bushes, too.
Next year we’re planning to expand the orchard to include peaches, nectarines, cherries, and apricots, and then we’ll add to the berry patch with some additional blueberry and raspberry bushes as well as some blackberries and grapes.
For now, we’re growing what we can eat and enjoy and then share with a few of our neighbors. We haven’t decided if we’ll set up a fruit and veggie stand because we want to get really good at growing our food first before we dive into something like a roadside farm stand here on the farm. Maybe one day!
Another big change we made this year was ordering soaker hoses for the Big Garden. So instead of standing out there overhead hand watering all the plants, we’ll be installing some extra long soaker hoses snaked through each of the rows of plants so we can water at the roots directly into the soil, keep the plants healthier, and save water, too.
We’re in the process of building out a weeding, mowing, weed whacking, pruning, and general maintenance plan for all our growing spaces this year, with the idea being that we’ll do a little big every day rather than waiting for the tasks to pile up and having to spend our entire weekend trying to catch up. That should free up our weekends to relax and enjoy the summertime farm and be able to head out for weekend adventures now and then, too!
Stay tuned via our Instagram as of course we’ll share growing progress along the way, what goes well and doesn’t, and the wonderful harvests the garden produces for us, too.
I’m curious to know. What about you? Are you growing a garden or growing space this year? Do you get your fruits and veggies from a farm market or stand? What’s going into yours? Tell me about your gardens or growing spaces and feel free to DM me photos on IG any time!