Since we have been married we have always wanted a small homestead of our own to raise our two young kids on. We had to wait sometime to actually set some roots down due to being in the military. Once we finally ended that chapter of our lives we were able to find a nice quiet place in East Tennessee. We wanted to be as self sufficient as we could so we brought in chickens, honey bees, planted 20 fruit trees, 750 gallon rain catchers, and even have a large off grid solar system in the back yard.
We started out our gardening experience right off the git go with the issue of where to put our garden since a lot of our property is hill side. Once we finally decided on a spot we found that the ground was just hard clay, and slate. We ended up bringing in 7 truckloads of garden soil to till up with our dirt. Once we finally got the soil constancy to what we thought was good we planted our seeds. We had a very wet spring which helped some of the seeds, but some seeds failed to germinate. As some of the garden started to take root well, we almost immediately ran into insects eating our plants. We learned a lot from the class and used the provided insecticide which worked wonders for our broccoli. Unfortunately, our green beans took the blunt of these bugs and were almost wiped out.
After we got our bugs and diseases under control the garden started to look great. Then our hardest battle yet came with the summer heat and dry weather. We had caught hundreds of gallons of rain water to help water the garden but it wasn’t enough for how hot and dry it was this year. Luckily we learned from the class that mulch works great to help hold moisture for the plants. We really didn’t understand how much water a garden needs, especially in the heat. We didn’t get a lot of melons and squash because of the heat preventing female flowers from forming. Along with the heat came the vine boring beetles. We never really we able to beat them completely but we did keep their damage to a minimum.
With the help of lots of water and pest control learned from the class, we were able to gather a large harvest of zucchini and cucumbers. We froze a lot of the zucchini for winter breads and muffins and we got 8 nice jars of pickles thanks to the pickling class we attended. We shared what we cant use with our chickens to help them stay healthy and giving us fresh eggs. One other issue was wild life. We had a very well fed raccoon that ate almost all of our corn before we finally caught him. On the positive side we are still waiting on what looks to be a very promising sweet potato harvest.
Armed with the wealth of knowledge we have collected this year; our next year’s garden should be very productive.
~Jamie Shamblin
