My name is Winnie Li, I have a family of four, we have been settled in Jonesborough over 3 years now.
We have a 1.5-acre property. The first thing when we move to this home, we planted about 50 grape vines. Then fruit trees, then worked on the garden, I still remember the first day we dug the grass out, made our first garden bed. We turned hard yellow clay into beautiful black soil in three years of hard work.
I grew up in a farmhouse, most of the time we only ate what we grew. We ate a lot of vegetables, approximately 95% of the meals were vegetables and rice, rarely meat or preserved food. Here in the market, it is very hard to find a variety of vegetables. The best way is to grow by myself. Luckily my husband Ronald Anderson is a vegetable lover, he loves the high-quality food. He is so passionate about gardening just like me. He has no experience of gardening at all, but he watches YouTube all the time to learn from scratch, make the correct soil. We were so excited growing our own food, we wanted all kinds of vegetables, too many that we have to keep expanding our garden bed. We feel like never enough to grow all the food that we wanted to grow.
This is the third year of growing. We have 10 garden beds, each one about 4×25 ft. I grow all the vegetables that I grew up with. Beans, spicy peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, bitter melon, winter melon, pumpkin etc. And the vegetable that we love but never grow before. I have a hard time tracking and recording. Make a good gardening plan. This year joining the BIU is the best decision. It helps me a lot keep the timeline, forced me to make the records, on top of the experiences that we accumulated, we are doing so much better this year.
Except for freezing the food, this year we did quite a lot of canning which I never thought I could do. I still have a lot to learn about preserving food. I felt so good when I saw our freezer filled up with vegetables from the garden, especially during the wintertime, I appreciated every bite of the food that came from the garden. I am so proud that I can share some of my food with the neighbors and friends.
The last but most important thing is I must learn how to cook food better that my family loves to eat them. I love the food just the way it is, boiling or stir frying it, adding a pinch of salt, a drip of soy source, but not my girl and boys. I am going to reduce the garden size, make better planting plan, Growing 3 seasons in a year. Spend more time on learning how to preserve and cook food.
