The Start of Something New : Our Garden
Josh and I have many dreams as a couple. Some of you will know that one of those dreams is having our own homestead. If you don't know, head over to my post called "10 Things You Didn't Know About Me." Those of you who don't know what homesteading is, its a self-sustainable lifestyle more often held on a farm. There are ways to homestead in urban areas but Josh and I would like a farm where we self-sustain our family and our livestock as much as we can by living off the land, growing produce, and making things for ourselves (like bread, pasta, cleaning products, etc.). Creating a homestead from scratch is going to be time consuming, difficult, and sometimes expensive, but we never back down from a challenge, especially if its our main goal in life. We are currently renting our house and we don't have enough land or approval from our landlords to go full out and start everything that we'd like such as chickens, so we are starting small and taking our journey one step at a time. The first thing we have decided to do is work on our garden!
Josh and I love eating as fresh as we can so having our own produce growing in our backyard is going to be fantastic! This is our second year working on our garden and here is our progress so far.
Josh has been collecting seeds since before we had even started dating, which was about 7 years ago. This year, we decided to go through those seeds and see how well we could grow fruits, vegetable, and herbs from scratch. I'm not 100% sure what all he has growing in the seed starter, and he is a lot better with all of the fancy names, but I do know we have asparagus, carrots, Roma tomatoes, and cilantro. You can obviously see that there's way more than that but seeds are his specialty so I'm leaving him to it. We had a bad storm the other night and we forgot to bring the tray in, so it got flooded which is why the starter kit looks soaked.
I have a huge problem with tomatoes (and sweet potatoes but that's a different thing..) so we have about 5 tomato seedlings and Roma seeds in the seed starter. I love eating tomatoes which is not such a good thing for my skin (because I have rosacea) but I'm not willing to give them up for anything. Out of all of our tomato seedlings, we have 3 Cherokee Purples, 1 Yellow Pear, and 1 Yellow SunSugar. We grew the Romas last year from a mature plant we purchased at a store, and we got so many tomatoes off that plant it wasn't even funny. Joshua swears by a trick that he learned from God knows where about growing tomatoes. He claims that by 'bonking' the flowers, the tomatoes grow faster. Now, I don't know how scientifically correct that statement is but I do know that we had tomatoes coming our of our ears last year before my plant died from the first frost. He bonked those flowers everyday until they turned into fruit. I forgot to take a picture of the SunSugar but below are the Cherokee Purple and Yellow Pear.
My favorite fruit of all time is strawberries. I seriously cannot get enough of them. This is our first strawberry plant and I am so excited to see how it grows. I'm also super excited to see how much fruit we will be able to get off of it since he's so little. SIDE STORY: Last summer, my local Walmart got an overabundance of strawberries in because the harvest was so good that they started selling them for $1/ lb. The 2 lb boxes were still being sold at like $4/ box. I still saw people grabbing 2 lb boxes (like are you serious?), while I loaded up my cart with 1 lb boxes. I probably ate 10 lbs of strawberries all on my own in a matter of a week. I did not regret it at all and I'm always checking the strawberries just in case it happens again this year. Needless to say, I LOVE STRAWBERRIES!
Lavender is just amazing. Josh and I absolutely love the smell, and we buy pretty much all of our cleaning products in lavender scent. We bought this plant because not only do we love how it smells but you can also do so many things with it, and as a bonus, it helps keep pests away from your other plants.
I'm always hesitant when purchasing vegetables that have such a distinct flavor like banana peppers. Josh picked up this little sweet banana pepper seedling because he has visions of pickling them and putting them on pizza. I don't know about you, but while I do enjoy banana peppers, I can't eat them unless I'm in the mood for them. If you have any recipes that call for sweet banana peppers, besides pizza, let me know in the comments!!
I really don't like things that are spicy, especially jalapeños, but Josh does so he got this little Coolapeño pepper plant. He claims that they are't spicy so that I can eat them but I am really skeptical. I am willing to try it when it starts producing so we will have to wait and see. I'll keep y'all updated.
Josh and I love citrus.
Oranges- Yaassss.
Lemons- Double yassss.
Calamondin- um..what?
This little tree is called a calamondin tree. Its a citrus tree that stays small and produces tiny oranges that are a hybrid between kumquats and mandarins. This is Josh's pride and joy. He is taking care of this little guy like its his baby because we want it him produce fruit for us so bad. The peel of the orange is supposed to be sweet and the inside is supposed to be tart. We are both super excited to see this little guy grow and to taste his fruit. I will also keep you updated on how he turns out. If you would like to try your hand at growing this one, you can get it at Lowe's Home Improvement. They even have some that already have little fruits on them.
This raspberry plant pulled a Jesus move on us this year. We got this little lady late last summer. We were hoping that, this year, she would produce some fruit. The issue came when the first frost caught us off guard. Just like the Roma tomato plant, the raspberry quickly declined after that frost. We were really upset when spring rolled around this year and nothing seemed to be happening with our plant. We were close to pulling it up and getting a new one because we believed that it had died. One day, I went outside to check on the other fruit bushes and a tiny little leaf was poking out of the middle of where the dead plant was. I screamed with excitement and dragged Josh out of the house to look at the little leaf. Over the past few weeks, that one little leaf turned into this beautiful little raspberry bush. It's still growing and we are not expecting any fruit from it this year but we are absolutely not going to let this year's frost take us by surprise. This plant looks 20x better than what it did at the time we purchased the first one so we are ecstatic and can't wait to see how big she grows this season.
Unlike our raspberry bush, this blackberry bush over-wintered extremely well. We got flowers from him last year but the berries never developed. This year, there are so many buds on this plant that it's not even funny. Our first flower emerged a couple days ago and we are really hopeful for an abundant harvest from him this year.
Blueberries are probably my second favorite fruit. Because blueberry bushes do so much better when they cross-pollinate, we have 3 different subspecies under the Rabbiteye category. The first plant pictured is our Powder Blue. We got him last year and he produced a decent amount right after we purchased him. It was no surprise to us that he over-wintered beautifully and starting producing berries quickly this season.
Our second blueberry bush is this little Brightwell. We also purchased her last year, but she is our second Brightwell. The first one we got wasn't doing so hot at the store and we decided to bring him home at a discounted price in hopes that we could bring him back to good health. We were unsuccessful in doing so and shortly after we got him, we dug him up and replaced him with a healthier bush. While she was healthier, she was smaller than the first so we knew she wasn't going to produce last year. She over-wintered much better than we expected and has put a lot of energy into growing leaves so far. Her leaves are absolutely beautiful and we are excited to see what happens with her throughout the rest of the season. We are called her the late bloomer (ha! pun 100% intended).
This champ, our 3rd blueberry bush, is an unknown Rabbiteye variety and he is my pride and joy. We purchased him this year when we felt as though our Powder blue wasn't producing as well as it could have been. Because blueberries do better cross-pollinating and our Brightwell has been a slow grower, we decided to go for a 3rd blueberry bush that was also producing at the store. Not long after we put this guy in the ground, our Powder Blue is doing fantastic (as shown in the first blueberry closeup image). He is doing great and has tons of berries. As you can see, he is the first out of all of our plants to be ripening so I'm really exciting to try these out when they're ready.
This is the start of our little garden/homestead and we are so excited. Seeing all of our plants doing so well this year is making us even more excited for this growing season and has revived the initial excitement we had after deciding that homesteading is what we want to do with our lives. I will keep you guys updated on everyone's progress and how they taste throughout the season.
If you have any growing tips and tricks you'd like to share, post them in the comments below!!
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