My reluctant journey into gardening

As I have mentioned before, gardening is not something that came to me naturally. I am the youngest of four daughters. All three of my older sisters each worked a summer at a plant nursery. They each spent a summer, in the heat, working long hours with plants, doing manual labour. I would see them come home dirty, tired and often sunburned. Despite all the work, dirt and sunburns, they all told me it was worth it as they made great money for a summer job. I opted instead to make slightly over minimum wage at Starbucks. I am embarrassed to say that back then the idea of my hands having to get super dirty, or the possibility of bugs being around, freaked me out way too much even if it meant making a lot of money. I preferred to consume way too many frappuccinos and burn my hands with ridiculously hot milk when certain customers would insist on specific temperatures for their milk as if somehow drinking scalding milk made you more sophisticated than drinking regular lattes. This was of course back when you could still request exact temperatures at Starbucks, and we had to write down every preference on the cup with a sharpie instead of the computer just printing off the order to stick on the cup. Yes, I am still to this day a bit jealous that we had to do so much more than the baristas must today.

It wasn’t like we had tons of plants growing in our small cement pad of a backyard growing up. There was a little flower bed in front of the house, that included some giant bush that was apparently always taking over everything. I remember we had some chives as my dad liked to have fresh chives. Mom always had some plants and flowers growing in the backyard flower bed, but I couldn’t tell you what they were as I always just remember the ivy that seemed to take over the whole back fence. There were a few house plants growing up, but I don’t think I ever watered them or even took an interest in knowing how often they should be watered. I will always remember when we tried to have an apple tree, and we got a little one in the back yard. Our dog promptly chewed it down to nothing, and that was the end of that. We also didn’t need to ever mow our lawn or use a weedwhacker because we lived in a townhouse, and they had someone who was responsible for yard maintenance. When I was living with my sister and her husband, when I first moved to Winnipeg, I remember being so fascinated by his electric mower that I pleaded with him to let me mow the lawn because it was such a novelty. That novelty quickly wore off and I never did it again.

Even when Brent and I moved into our first house together, I rarely mowed the lawn. He used to work on the railways and would sometimes be gone for two or three weeks at a time, and I would leave the grass to grow until he got back. I never raked the leaves or did any weeding, I took the approach that dandelions gave a little colour to our boring grass out front, much to the horror of my mother-in-law. She only lived a few blocks away and I would often look out my front window and see her there pulling weeds from my front lawn. She is an avid gardener, and her backyard always looks like something out of a gardening magazine. The first time I met her was when Brent brought me home for a backyard barbecue dinner, and I was so amazed at all the flowers she had and how perfect they all seemed. Not only did she grow beautiful flowers, but she had raspberries and tons of vegetables that she used for canning. It was amazing, but it seemed like so much work that I continued to happily tend to my one lilac tree that had come with our house that only required the occasional trimming, which I would generally pass off to Brent. She tried, in vain, to plant flowers in our yard, and I promptly managed to kill them all. Not exactly a recipe for a great future homesteader.

We did have some small success with a few vegetables in our small yard. We planted cucumbers which actually vined up the lilac tree which was pretty impressive and made picking them very easy. We got a few cherry tomatoes, though we lost a lot to bugs. Our peppers never lasted and always got bugs or diseased before they were ripe enough to pick. Our biggest successes were our potatoes and raspberries that we planted in front of our house. Our raspberry bush went crazy and was producing awesome berries. The potatoes I found to be the most satisfying to cultivate. Every time you dig into the dirt, it feels like you are searching for buried treasure. The potatoes and raspberries were the first big crops, or at least I thought they were big at the time, and they really sparked my curiosity in my gardening potential.

When we moved to our new house in the country, it was the first day of September, so we were not going to be harvesting any crops that year. We did, however, inherit two crab apple trees, a mini apple tree, a chokecherry bush and grape vines from the previous owners. We collected box, after box, after box, of apples during that first month in the house. There were apples everywhere. I had no idea what we would do with this many apples and it felt extra daunting as I was 8.5 months pregnant at the time. Ultimately, we chose the easiest option which was to make them into applesauce. We filled almost our entire small chest freezer with applesauce. My mom came by to help with the chokecherries which she graciously offered to turn into chokecherry jam for us as long as she got to keep some. Free jam and free harvesting, um yes please! She also decided to pick all the grapes and turn them into jam as well. Seeing all of our preserves from doing absolutely nothing, I was certain that I would be able to handle this gardening thing and that I would be able to make all kinds of foods with our fresh produce.

In the spring, we started planning out what we would be putting into our garden. As Penny is born at the beginning of October, I became obsessed with the idea of having a pumpkin themed birthday for her and insisted that we make a pumpkin patch, something that we had never had the space, nor the interest in my case, in doing before. Brent got some help from our neighbour and tilled a patch behind the barn that turned out to be bigger than our entire lot of our old house. He threw in the seeds we had saved from the 9 pumpkins we had bought in October when we had first moved in, and we figured we would see what happened. What happened was we ended up with close to 400 pumpkins. I was shocked and pleasantly surprised. We also had another huge crop of apples, zucchini, tomatoes, peas, beans, potatoes and cucumbers. All from just testing out throwing some seeds in the ground and seeing what came up. We thought we had hit the motherload for planting. Clearly it was going to be easy to grow our own vegetables out here. We had barely done any research or planning and had huge success with our vegetables.

Last year, we thought we would take some more time to plan things out as to maximise the growing potential. We started seeds indoors in early/mid spring. We had about 70 tomato plant seedlings ready to go, although some certainly got damaged with having a 1.5 year old and 4 year old wanting to touch them all the time. Regardless, we were optimistic that our gardens would be bountiful again and we even decided to try corn. Unfortunately, Mother Nature had other plans. No sooner had we transplanted our 70 tomato plants that we were hit with weeks of intense rain that flooded our entire garden. Sadly, there were no survivors out of the tomatoes. Our pumpkin patch, which had been so promising the year before, had the opposite problem and promptly dried up leaving our vines scorching. The weeds got away from us and we were dealing with thistles the size of our daughters. Despite efforts from both my mother-in-law and my mother to come help with the weeding, we gave up halfway through as I had little time to deal with it when Penny was still very dependent on me. I managed to get my hands dirty a little, especially with the teeny beets that we ultimately ended up composting as they were so small they weren’t worth much. We got a few cucumbers, four pumpkins, and a couple potatoes, although the potato bugs ravaged our crops last year.

This year, instead of scaling back we decided to go all out on our seeds. We tested a few seeds from each of our vegetables by placing them in between damp paper towel and sealing them in a Ziploc bag to see if they would sprout.

We ordered new seeds online, and I decided to no longer fear my flower killing abilities and I ordered a dozen new flowers to try to make my own cut flower garden. Now, is this ambitious, absolutely. We are planting potatoes, corn, peas, beans, pumpkins, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, spinach, romaine lettuce, beets, carrots, garlic, onions, raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries. Would it perhaps have been more prudent to scale back and try to hone our gardening skills to make sure we don’t have another bad crop year like last year, probably. But Brent and I have always been the type to just leap in and figure it out later. We bought our first house 4 days after we decided we should start looking for a house. Brent quit his job when he decided to start his own company 5 months before Cece was born. We have always just believed that things will work out and if not, we will figure it out. This is our approach to this homesteading adventure, and our grand gardening plans, what’s the worst that could happen?