Taming the Jungle

when my mom was pregnant with me she worked in a huge organic garden on a farm. When I was pregnant with my first child, I grew veggies in a 4×6 garden bed. That’s the biggest garden I’ve had in my adult life. So, when we were looking at our place to purchase last spring, and saw the garden space, it was both exciting and daunting. Because here’s the thing, not only was it a huge space, it was full on jungle. Blackberries, ivy, grass, weeds, falling apart greenhouse, netting caught up with the ivy & blackberries. You could see that at one point in time, many, many years ago, it was a well maintained space. But it was magical. The whole .46 acres of land.

Fast forward 4 months, when we finally got to move in and tackle the project house & property. And the jungle. 

It was the end of August 2015 when the tackling of the jungle began. It was a couple of months of just hacking down all the mess. I did a lot of it myself, since my husband was away working, but I had help from my dad as well. It was hard work, but very rewarding & surprisingly enjoyable.

We then come to decemeber, when the existing garden beds were (mostly) all visible, and (mostly) useable. With many more turns of the dirt to do before it was actually planting season. But garlic made its way as the first planting job. And how exciting that was! (To date they are on their way to being done & ready to pull out!)

its a constant battle with the persistent blackberries, grass & ferns pushing their way up (what seems like) daily. As a mom of two young ones and a husband who works away from home durning the garden season, it’s very hard to get any more then 20mins at a time to really focus on what needs to be done in the garden. So the weeds are one with the garden plants at the moment. So far, they aren’t strangling out the goods…

we started most of our starts indoors under a grow light, only buying a few starter plants. The amazing speed of the sprouts popping up through the dirt was a daily joy, and the wonder if they would survive the transplant. Luckily, most did make it to their ‘big plant beds’ with only a few casualties. And hey, most even popped back after deer ate half of them! (Yup, that was not a fun few days, trying to deer proof the garden more)

Ok, so, long story short, because this is getting long, we have come a far away with our jungle, with so much more to go. I saw a beautiful garden the other day, and it was one of those gardens that made me think “yup, that’s my goal”. So to have a picture of that in my mind, to one day work towards, makes it more inspiring.

In the meantime, we have food growing, we have worms in our soil & we have happy souls with dirty hands. And there is nothing better.