In 2011, the landlords granted us access to "the big garden." We were fully unprepared to deal with this. I bought far, faaaar too many seeds, laid out a plan that tried to stretch a tiny garden over a large garden plot. Everything was way too close together, and we ended up with large fallow areas because we had no idea about spacing. And it was unbelievably weedy, partially due to having laid fallow for well over 5 years. We learned what mugwart was, and started to loathe it. We grew lots of tomatoes, really good squash (mostly by accident, as most people tend to do with squash) and some really fantastic corn. The corn was also a total accident. There were some cucumbers in there, and we failed miserably at keeping track of greens. The woodchucks also totally ravaged everything. I started killing them, but just buried their bodies under the crops. On the suggestion from a friend that I teach her how to shoot a bow so she could bowhunt (which predictably never happened- her fault, not mine) I signed up for a bowhunter safety course, since I had been looking for a reason to start shooting again. I hadn't touched a bow in about a decade at that point. At that point, we dipped into eating meat again, both of us for the first time in a really long time. The neighbors were very generous with sharing venison with us.
In 2012, we got married, and Naomi claims that I put all my wedding stress into the garden. This may or may not be true, however. I started to get some ideas, understood how environmental forces acted on the garden site, and read some books. I read some garden basics stuff, since I had never previously done that. I also got accidentally turned on to permaculture, and read a couple of permaculture-related books. I staked out beds in the big garden, and did my best at a very amateur attempt at hugelkultur. I mostly used moldy waste hay, and a bunch of small branches. I made my mounds something like 8-12" high- which turned out to be enough to keep the beds from flooding, which had happened frequently prior to that. We grew garlic for the first time. We had our first success with potatoes, which we stopped trying to grow in a trench in heavy soil!!! I experimented with growing mushrooms, was baking bread in full swing, and finally found some wild edibles, mainly fiddleheads and ramps. We got chickens! I build the first hoophouses, and experimented with season extension to some degree of success. I successfully grew onions and spinach for the first time. We had parsnips, beets, and celebrated the first official Harvest Night as a reflection on the previous year's experience. To date, 2012 was our most successful and bountiful year across the board.
2013 was a hard year, but also a good one. Penelope came to us in the spring, along with many more chickens than we had expected. I got cocky with my garden that year. After the wild success of 2012, I thought I was an expert. It turned out that I didn't quite do things the way I should have. This was a year of further experimentation too. I tried growing tomatoes in a weave for the second time, but planted them out much later than usual. It was an attempt to push off harvest closer to cool weather in order to get maximum storage. Also in an attempt to further protect the soil, we mulched EVERYTHING, which brought on a mice/vole problem that we didn't expect. In spite of all the mulch, we didn't mulch the potatoes as much, and the harvest suffered there as well. At this point, we weren't certain of the future of our garden there. We began taking steps to get out. I think this contributed to the way we put effort into the garden as well, letting perfect be the enemy of the good.
Now in 2014, we are finally in a place of our own. It's been a hard road thus far, and our growing season was mostly a loss. We did get a good potato yield, some OK garlic, a bunch of rye (yay! finally a grain success) and some other smaller stuff from "the big garden." We've managed to create a few garden beds here so far, although much smaller (8'x6') which seems much more manageable so far. I got all new seed stock for garlic, and we're already back to eating our own salads almost every night.
