Ouch, do we hurt! But, we are done with our gardens, as we’ve planned them! We are in the ground, raised bed or container for everything we intended to grow this season.
Our final container gardens are now complete, which brings us to the end of our major garden prep! Here, we have another centrally irrigated GroBucket system, plus another 40 or so standalone GroBuckets that we use “as the manufacturer intended.” (We’ll talk more about this soon!) Our central irrigation systems are all primed and ready to make these gardens a cakewalk for the remainder of the season.
We are thinking we read the season correctly this year. We were fortunate to get even our peppers outdoors at this point. Overnight lows are looking like very high 40’s to low 50’s for the next 10 days, so we’re looking like we are in the clear. (We know we say 50F for peppers, but 49F is “close enough.”) We needed a good solid spring after last season, that one was not fun. We didn’t even hit solid 50’s overnight until July!
If you’re looking for a reference for an “at scale” grower, our roughly 2,000 square feet of garden space takes us a little over 120 hours to prepare and plant between the two of us. That doesn’t include the time raising our plants from seed. We estimate that we only produce about 15 to 20 percent of our annual food needs with all this effort. So, you can see why we chuckle a bit when armchair gardeners talk game about “growing all their own food.”
Even to get to this level of “barely scratching” self-sufficiency, we have to take an entire week off work to get all this prep work done. Growing your own (at scale) is literally a job plus a lot of overtime, at certain times. Fortunately, once you get to this point, it’s relatively easy to maintain going forward.
The next major hurdles are all the harvesting and preservation, which also take a lot of time. The good news is that this doesn’t come on “all at once” like season prep does, so we can space it out over time.
We will continue to plant a few more things. We have a few plants left over, so we’ll stuff these into extra containers we have around. These “extra things” are entirely outside of our actual garden plan, so we think of them like bonus plants. We prefer not to compost our raised plants if we can avoid it, but if we do, it doesn’t bother us too much.
We are really looking forward to some of our first, fresh produce which should be starting here fairly soon. We’ll be sure to take you along with all the various things we’ve done, divining deeper into our gardens through the season. We have some fun things to share with you all!
But, for now, we’re thinking we’ve earned a nice bourbon to sip on the deck, while we admire all our hard work for the last week!
