Starting the Garden Over

In every gardener’s life, there comes a time when you wish you could hit a reset button. You look over the garden area you use and wish you could just snap your fingers and have a clean slate again. You know more now and have experience with different plants, have dreamt about a different layout that would work better, and it is exciting to start fresh! Usually though, when you are starting the garden over, it is because something big changed in your life. In our case, we moved to a new location.

I am thrilled with the idea of starting fresh! The last 3 years have been incredibly educational for me and we have enjoyed some pretty decent harvests from the efforts. What I am not looking forward to is all the back breaking work that will go along with it. My lazy streak can be brutal sometimes. The longevity of rewards though make it all worth it. So here I am, faced with a very different area to work with than what I had before. At the old place I had a nice, open area that got full sun exposure for easily 12-14 hours a day in the summer (remember, Alaska! Super long days!) and it even faced south. There were 3 cold frames and the green house with an attached raised bed with room to expand if needed. The new space is more…raw than that.

Last weekend, I was sitting on our lovely covered porch, thinking about how to best utilize the area without having to worry about the dogs playing and knocking stuff over. I also have to consider that they may want to nibble on the greens as well. Then there is the light, or lack thereof, that I have to deal with. We are kind of situated back into a little hole in the trees. There is a monster great grandpa of a cedar tree in the front that has limbs growing out over the driveway but it allows plenty of sunlight on the porch. The smaller trees down the sides of the house are the real issue – they block out so much light!

Other than the porch, there is some space to put cold frames and even a nice little greenhouse but like I said, the land is more raw and it will be some time before we are able to get trees and stumps removed, things backfilled, and leveled out. This next growing season, I will be more limited than I have since I started this journey! That is part of the joy of living this lifestyle though, overcoming the challenges in unique and hopefully free or inexpensive ways and feeling like a rockstar come harvest time.

One other thing about the new location is the incredible amount of slugs around. I thought I had it bad before, this new place will be my biggest challenge yet! I am not worried about the food that grows in containers on the porch as they are high up, get great sun exposure, and I can catch the slimy little buggers before they make it up the supports but on the ground? That is going to be a battle royale. I want to build and place a couple cold frames on the sides of the driveway where shade loving plants will thrive but coming up with what to grow there is a harder part of starting the garden over for me. There is so much I want to grow and have dreamt of being able to expand and increase our variety but it will still be a couple years before I have the area truly useable and systems in place. For now, I plan to plant the following:

In Containers on Porch

• Onions
• Green beans
• Green onions
• Cucumber (Patio snacker variety which are smaller for pickling)
• Peas (I look forward to building the trellis for them to climb up!)
• Potatoes (slugs looove potato plants, best to grow in bags on the porch)

Hanging Pots on Porch

• Basil
• Parsley
• Sage
• Strawberries (hoping they will do better this year!)

In Cold Frames

• Carrots
• Garlic (Even though I want to plant right now, the first run will have to be planted in spring. Ugh)
• A couple heads of cabbage
• Celery
• Kale and other greens
• Beets

We don’t have a bunch of money to buy supplies for building all of these wonderful things but the containers on the porch will be a nice mix of wooden boxes and plastic buckets. After seeing what my friend was able to accomplish last year with only container gardening, I am very hopeful that we will be able to get a nice harvest this year, too. I will be going back to The Square Foot Gardener to get refreshed on different ways I can use as much space as possible for the largest harvests, along with reading up on vertical gardening again. The supplies will come along for the rest but at least now, we have a plan! I can’t wait to share how it turns out with everyone!