As you are all well aware, we have started our downsizing in preparation for the move a little over 100 weeks from now (yikes!). This week on the chopping block is all of our greenhouse supplies.
How it started…
This is ironic given that this time of year, garden season, is always our favorite. We started a garden about 10 years ago when Gene and my dad surprised me with a raised garden bed in the backyard. We bought squash, tomato, cucumber, and pepper plants and had so much fun watching them grow.
Then the kids outgrew the playset that took up the only other flat part of our backyard, and our neighbor took down a tree that cast that section of the yard in shade. We gave the playset away to whoever was willing to haul it away and started thinking through garden bed designs.
Around that time, we started watching a You Tube channel called Roots & Refuge. Jess walked us through raised bed gardening and introduced us to cattle panels as trellises. Our minds were blown! We went out and bought cattle panels immediately. We even found some buried in the dirt under our deck!
At one point we had about 15 cattle panels of various sizes. Some were in the upper garden bed training beans, peppers, squash, etc. as well as some clematis (that are still going strong!),
Others were in the lower garden for tomatoes and cucumbers. The pic below (left) is from a few years ago but it is pretty much exactly what the garden looks like today.
Kicking it up a notch…
As we got deeper into gardening, and with guidance from Jess at Roots & Refuge, we decided to start growing our own plants from seeds. Jess recommended heirloom seeds and Missouri has one of the best heirloom seed companies in the country – Baker Creek Seeds! We have bought our seeds almost exclusively from Baker Creek since this endeavor started.
We used tarps to create “walls” in a section of the garage and put some metal shelving and a table in our new greenhouse “room”. We bought LED lights that would be sufficient for growing seedlings but weren’t strong enough to grow full plants (those were more expensive and since we were moving them outdoors for the spring and summer, there was no need). In January/February each year, we planted seeds in small plastic pots (or red Solo cups work great too!) and watched them grow.
We always knew that growing our own vegetable was not a financially viable endeavor. The supplies, the seeds, dirt, fertilizer, time, heat, etc. made each tomato we grew pretty expensive. And plants are fickle. What works one year may not work the next. We had one year where we hardly had any tomatoes. The next year we were drowning in them! But the fun we’ve had growing them has made all the frustration worth it.
Our heirloom veggie food bank…
One of the things we enjoyed the most was giving our extra veggies away to the neighborhood. Our garden expansion came around the same time the older kids moved out, so we ended up with way more veggies that we could eat. We posted each week on our neighborhood Facebook page and loved seeing our neighbors come and help themselves to our extra tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.
The end of an era…
About a month ago we made the decision that 2024 was our last season growing from seed. We will have a garden next year, but we will buy plants. We decided to do this now because we need the garage space for other projects – most immediately painting all of the doors in the house in our quest to eradicate all of the honey oak wood stain from the house.
The extra cattle panels were the first things to go. We put them up on our local Buy Nothing Group Facebook page last week and they ended up going to a family who had some land and wanted to start their own garden. We love that these are going to be used by someone who will appreciate them as much as we did.
We’ve sold/given away all of our seedling pots – they went to a teenager who just got a greenhouse from her mom and is super excited to get started on her gardening journey.
Next up will be our hydroponic supplies. We probably won’t ask what the buyer is going to use these for, since it will very likely be to grow marijuana and we’d rather just not know! 😊
Some tradeoffs are hard…
We know that growing vegetables will very soon be in our past and that makes us a bit sad. But we also love farmer’s markets and buying locally grown produce from other growers, so we are looking forward to doing that in every place that we visit.
We knew that this choice would come with tradeoffs; no one gets everything they want. This is a tradeoff we are willing to make. But if we find a tomato plant in a pot on an island, you bet we’ll buy it and try to coax a tomato or two out of it before we move on. You can take the gardeners out of the garden, but you can’t take the garden out of the gardeners!
Leave a Reply