Growing My Garden Week #1!
Our gardening and homesteading posts on Steem have inspired me to start my own garden!
Inspiration on Steem!
These posts on Steem most motivated me to begin applying what I learned reading here in my own backyard especially when combined with meeting so many of us at Steemfest 2!
- Homesteading Saved My Life by @sthomestead was the first post I read on Steem about #homesteading. Thank you to @winvideos for recommending this post which was featured in upvotable 8.
- The Remarkable Diary of an Earthship Eco Builder Chapter #2. The dream was born. by @eco-alex gave me a new vision of what to build in the future instead of simply a newer and bigger house.
- Have Too Much Food In Your Garden? Give It Away! Join The "Food Is Free" Project This Year by @lyndsaybowes shows the incredible difference we can make by growing a garden at home with so much food we can give it away! If just a few of our neighbors had gardens like this, most of us could count on never missing a meal! Thank you @colorado-girl for recommending this for upvotable #15.
- Fruitsandveggiesmonday by @lenasveganliving : Gardening was one of the first posts I have read in my entire life seeing a garden made at home from start to finish and stayed with me until I realized that when I started gardening I could also document the adventure here! Thank you to @luckysteem for recommending this post in upvotable #23
- @gardenbsquared shows us how easy it is to grow our own pineapples which I did not consciously remember reading when weeks later I all the sudden got an urge to grow my own pineapples! Now seeing this post again I realize this post was likely responsible for the idea which I then attributed to myself instead of the blog post! Thank you to @bolaamir who earned 10 SBD for the recommendation in upvotable 31!
Those are just the articles I can recall from inclusion in my previous posts and there are at least twice that many more that I also read and enjoyed!
The First Step
After reading the posts above, the first step for me on this journey to garden began with realizing absurdity of my own living where I have a yard growing grass I cannot eat that costs money to get help with maintaining each week. I wrote a post about it named Why Grow Grass and Buy Food? #168 which planted the seed for me to get started as soon as the time was right.
Thank you also to @laurabanfield's mother Holly and my daughter Madeleine for loving gardening together so much which inspired me to take action instead of just reading posts!
The Time is Right!
A few months ago, I made a beginning by trying to grow pineapples using the heads from the fruits I bought at the store despite Holly's recommendation that I try something easier. A few weeks ago I finally gave up and threw out all of the pineapples I was trying to grow. After throwing them out, I realized it was time to get to work in the garden outside and grow something easier that produces a harvest faster!
With the routines I have setup daily, I often have ideas long before the right time comes to take action. Ironically, anything that is challenging, "bad", or traumatic in my life often inspires me to move forward with whatever I have been putting off. On the day after Christmas two weeks ago, my dog Peaches had an altercation with my daughter Madeleine resulting in a trip with Madeleine and @laurabanfield to All Children's Hospital for five stitches and a lot of gratitude for nothing worse.
After significantly above average amounts of crying, I experienced what felt like a mental housecleaning for the next several days resulting in intense clarity and a 95% reduction in the amount of thoughts in the brain including sometimes several minutes with not one thought while driving, sitting, or walking. The day after our trip to the hospital, I cleared my usual schedule consisting of working online and spent all day with my family. That day I went with Madeleine to Home Depot and bought all of the initial supplies for our garden and began setting everything up!
Pants Off Home Depot!
Madeleine liked the phrase "Pants off, dance off" which has been helpful for potty training recently. Somehow she turned this into "Pants off Home Depot" and now that is how I think of it too. Home Depot is a huge home improvement warehouse store near where I live in Saint Petersburg, Florida with everything we needed to start our garden! Here is what we bought on a total of two trips!
Lots of seeds!
Soil for grow bags and pots because we pretty much have sand in the backyard.
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Spinach
35 spinach plants because I was afraid of buying less and making a mess all over the car. Buying all six containers allowed me to buy the bottom also which made it easy to bring them home!
20 Home Depot 5 gallon buckets to use as portable pots.
@laurabanfield was aware of my gardening interest before I was ready to take action and had bought me these 15 gallon grow bags weeks before!
Here is what it looked like to begin in the backyard which had one kale plant from @laurabanfield's mom Holly that I had paid little attention to for the month before that ...
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Tomatoes
Madeleine and I began by planting the tomatoes I had picked up at Home Depot including drilling holes in the buckets to allow for drainage.
Week 1!
From turning a mostly barron backyard full of dog poop into the beginning of a garden in one week feels like a miraculous transformation! Here is the entire garden after the first week!
I am very grateful to have the opportunity to document this from the very beginning and to remain accountable to you here for the growth in my garden each week! For my new happier people blog and podcast videos, I will begin filming these in the garden using the new setup that @tomasgeorge helped me setup!
Thank you very much for joining us on this first week of gardening and we would love to hear your experience with gardening to make this post most valuable in the comments!
Love,
Jerry Banfield
Wow! It looks interesting! I have been engaged in vegetable gardens for a long time, I plant many kinds of vegetables, and then I make preparations. We can only garden in the summer time in Russia. We begin to plant in May and finish harvesting in September.
Wow @nearbird I wish I have your green thumb
CONGRATULATIONS Jerry on making this great choice! It is always hardest starting out as there is so much to set in place.. but it looks like you are well on your way! Doing this is so good and in so many ways. ..
It becomes like your special time when you go to the garden to check on your plants..it defiantly helps to relax and destress as you forget about the worldly distractions whilst you potter about the yard.
You will im Sure be very happy indeed with the taste of your harvests! Most people who only eat store bought fruits and vegetables have gotten used to the bland taste and lack of prana in mass produced food. I used to work in a fruit breeding farm as part of my Biology degree, and i was stunned to learn that TASTE is the very last thing they look at, and is of least importance. They are looking for yield. shelf life, resistance to pests etc.. So i cant wait to read your posts in a few months telling us all how amazing your food tastes!
One tip i would like to offer is that next time you buy heirloom seeds. These are original unbred / modified seeds that are really the best in may ways, and you can easily buy online. There's about 1000's websites but here is one example: https://www.seedsnow.com/
now is a great time to start composting also. Once the plants get going you will want to put compost on everything.. it speeds up growth and production many times over and is really easy to do if you get set up..
The easy 'no brainer' way to compost is to basically just keep all your food wastes except citrus (you don't eat meat so no need to separate it) and put it straight on the beds and cover with some soil. You CAN of course make a proper composting pit and keep it and turn it over every so often,.. but i know people who just throw the scraps straight on the beds and it works REALLLY well and saves all the time and space of making an actual compost heap.
Best of luck,
next step
build an off-grid house! ;-))
I want to try Aquaponic Systems
and this is a good start for eating good food.
Aquaponic is amazing anda great concept! It could be the future and help so many people on the planet
YES I would love to give this a try too and just heard about Aquaponic Systems within the last few months!
aquaponics can be GREAT in many ways an do work in terms of producing crops,, BUT it is not a natural state and you miss out on many benefits of using SOIL and the earth. You also miss out on many of the microoganisms that provide all kinds of micro nutrients like vitamin B12.. it is really not true organic in my opinion.. and half the joy of growing is getting your hands dirty in a low tech way.. rather than feeling more like a plumber than a gardener ;-)
I so agree with you @eco-lex as a fisheries graduate here I still prefer the natural way by sea l Iike sea ranching
I cannot buy aquaponic systems because I spend all my money in prostitutes
I voted my comment because they say it gives me money
This is also a great idea but I prefer fish from. The sea @modemser
So do I! I just don't have the room.
Here is a simple way to get started. I liked his focus on simplicity. I'm going to be trying this in the spring.
Auqaponics with fish is definitely the way to go, in my opinion. Wonderful way to grow hydroponically, don't need any chemicals, just take care of the fish. I plan on implementing this type of system myself in the future.
@rball8970 do try searanching
Sea ranching? I have never heard of it. I just looked it up, and you are referring to releasing fish as babies, for harvest later on? Sounds good, except I don't like to eat fish, in my fishy kingdom the fish would be king! :)
I like boobs (.)(.)
Love the garden Jerry!
Don't forget to add a layer of mulch! It'll help tons on those hot sunny days!
Wow! Looks like an awesome garden
Wow, you really are serious about this. Nice job mate! You can't go wrong with food that is from mother nature :)
Gardening is a very rewarding past time, my family enjoys gardening together. I hope you enjoy it as well!
@qwasert my family love gardening too. It's really rewarding to eat your produce
Nice post, it will be interesting to see how things develop. Our garden is bigger but it is difficult to grow vegetables as there are top many large trees.
Where is the garden
In the backyard!