Gardening is something that I never enjoyed when I was younger, and it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized how much time and effort truly go into having one. When my husband and I lived in our first home we had gardens and tried several different ways to garden.
We first started with gardening boxes but realized that wasn’t going to be a practical way of gardening for us once we moved to our property that we currently live on. Now I didn’t look into using raised beds quite as much as I should have because I thought “dirt in a box and put seeds in it” seemed easy enough. Well as I’m sure you have guessed our garden didn’t do as well. We put compost in the boxes and used topsoil but in the end, it just wasn’t for us.
The next year we went to just tilling up the ground and doing it that way. Now it worked better as we learned things we needed to do from the previous year but still the amount of weeding and just the overall look of it did not impress me. Our garden did do well, and we had a lot of vegetables produced so it was great in that sense. But still we wanted better.
Our third year doing a garden we did some more research and found lasagna gardening. For those who don’t know what that is here is my short description.
You started with a row and layer compostable material green then brown then green then brown, until you have your row built up enough. You then plant in it and once the end of the season come cut your plants back and leave them there. You then add another couple of layers of green and brown and let it compost down over the next few months before planting in it. This helps put nutrients back in the soil and is better because you aren’t disrupting the soil by tiling it up. You just let it compost down year after year adding to it when needed. It also helps on weeding because the compost should be heating up and killing weed seeds.
Now this is just my short and easy description it’s not going to answer all questions you might have about it, but you can get the idea from it.
So, our third-year gardening this is what we did. We didn’t have much to work with put we tried and thought it was a way that was going to work best for us. Our garden that year did alright but we had some issues just because we didn’t rotate our crops enough. We also were in the middle of building our house and couldn’t give our garden the time and attention it needed.
Our fourth and current year of gardening we had moved to our current property in October the previous year so there wasn’t much time to prep our garden area that year. When the spring came, we knew where we wanted our garden but then came the problem of too many pine trees where we wanted it. So, we picked a spot grew a couple pepper plants that didn’t do so great and called it good for the year.
We are now prepping our garden area so hopefully next year will go better.