All Things Garden Year 1

We don’t know about you guys but Emmalee is really an all or nothing person. So before we do literally anything, she’s done MASSIVE amounts of research… including what actually needs to be planted for our garden this year (check out her Garden Pinterest Board here). 

Year 1 really isn’t completely accurate but it’s the first year for a “real” garden… if that makes any sense?? We’ve tried hard to dig in and see exactly how much we should plan to plant, really thinking through what we’ll actually all eat (on that note - we’ve entered the “I don’t like it” stage with our toddler….pray for us!!!), what works well in our area - without it becoming an overwhelming all consuming process. 

Here’s what we are landing on and we’ll give you some updates as we go along…..(we’ll include the links we are using but we do not receive any sort of commission for them and we’ll tell you if we’d use them again with an after the season update). 

Our dirt is… terrible. It’s super sandy (Sandhills of NE is a real thing) and the people that lived in the house before us had odd? things happening in the yard, at least if what we’ve found tells us anything, and clean up has been a LONG ongoing process. We knew we were going to need some soil and we’re looking at the Jolly Gardener brand (because we can purchase it locally), and planning on doing a “no dig” method (we really loved THIS article), in slightly raised beds (these ones), while using our currently sprinkler system and hopefully (fingers crossed) getting a rain barrel system set up to use in the future. 

See? Lots of information 😜

Do you guys remember hearing in history class the idea of victory gardens? Well first, that’s an entire 🐇🐇Rabbit Hole 🐇🐇 to go down, but that’s the idea we started with. Something that might not replace EVERYTHING but something to take heat off the budget and allow us some say in how our food is produced. But how much food do you REALLY need per person for a year? As we looked we also started thinking about how often we have people over - and we have people over quote a bit (weekly SWARM Dinners), and love to provide meals for others… but we don’t want so much that we are overwhelmed with it.. So “back to the drawing board”!!! Emmalee did a search (which is always a good place to start when you don’t really know the question to ask…) about how much food to plant for a family of 4 (no - 4 is just an easy round number), and then we’ve been tweaking the plan from there. There is SO much information out there for what to plant!! We can tell you that EVERYONE and the dog will tell you to plant radishes… and we don’t like them 🤢so we won't be planting that. We eat a lot of tomatoes (especially in the winter) so we will have quite a bit of those, but probably not so many of the cherry / grape tomatoes - we just don’t really go through a lot of those 🤷‍♀️We are also going to try our hand at some Loofahs this year - and see where we can go from there with them 🥰. 

There’s lots of ways we are preparing and planning for the garden this year and we are really excited to drag you along with us on our journey 😜Make sure you are following along with our story on Instagram and Facebook (and yes - it’s been a while since we’ve done much posting).