Every once in awhile, we reflect on how far we’ve diverged from “traditional growing practice” in our attempt to “beat” the subarctic challenges. We do enough “regular/normal” gardening that it’s easy to forget sometimes that we definitely don’t fit the typical gardening mold perfectly.
A perfect example struck me today. Here I am “watering my garden.” And you look at it, it’s hard to even make sense of what’s going on as an outsider. It certainly doesn’t look at all like how one waters a garden!
In case you’re curious and haven’t seen our more “odd” gardening aspects before, this is one of our off-grid gardens. Instead of using a traditional hose sprayer or sprinkler, we’re using a reservoir that is carefully controlled to provide water into our container garden. We’ve written much on the subject on our website and even have a comprehensive video of it over on YT now.
Off-grid gardening has been an interesting pursuit, one that has challenged me in ways I’d never thought it would. It’s driven me to solutions that you’d rarely come to were it not for those “off grid” forces forcing a different way. It has made me better at conservation, a worthy value to uphold in life.
At this point, even if I went back to “on grid” gardening with infinite access to water, I’d still do things in an off-grid style. My “old ways” were crude and brute force, whereas off-grid is much more refined and well thought.
