the vegetable garden

Over the next year I coerced Jess into letting me plant tomatoes and potatoes and any number of other (somewhat unsuccessful) vegetables in the patch of dirt out front next to our wellhouse, convinced the patch of half-felled trees between the house and the shop (indicated by the arrow) was just too much of a construction zone to plant up. Needless to say, Jess wasn’t exactly thrilled and I wasn’t living the dream.

This is a still shot from a nauseatingly jerky video I took of our home the first day we were able to start moving in. At this point we didn’t even know where we would plant the garden we knew we desperately wanted, nor did we have an idea of what size or shape our garden should be.

In April of 2018 we bit the bullet and took the first step towards building both our flower and our vegetable gardens - in the form of a nearly $300 Harbor Freight greenhouse kit, on super sale from an ungodly $500.

We piled all the brush we trimmed and collected after windstorms around the base of the alders we eventually wanted to take down in an effort to slowly kill them off. It didn’t work, but we figured the ash would at least help to fertilize the garden beds we eventually wanted to install there. By now we had discovered our soil was all sand with about six inches of mediocre topsoil - and not a rock to be had anywhere. Perfect for digging and infrastructure, but not great for immediately growing fantastic vegetables.

But that didn’t stop me from trying to grow absolutely anything and everything in that six inches of crappy, un-amended (but rock free!) soil. We rented a sod cutter (the first of many times) and experimented with making a cold box out of rolled up soil and a salvaged sliding glass door.

Coincidentally, 2018 and 2019 were the years that I learned Russian Red Kale is absolutely indestructible in our climate, year round. Seriously - if you're in the pacific northwest and you haven’t grown Russian Red Kale and overwintered it, you haven’t seen true magic. When I tell you it refuses to die, I mean I seeded it inside my sandbox of a cold frame in October 2018 and it didn’t stop growing and reseeding until we demolished the cold box.

And then it seeded EVERYWHERE.

There’s kale seedlings sprouting up all over the back garden area and I couldn’t be happier about it.

In one day a local father-son team (thank you Amigo Tree Service!) literally removed what we saw as the biggest, most insurmountable obstacle to starting our vegetable garden in earnest. The mound of tree, roots, and blackberry brambles was felled, excavated, smoothed out, then neatly organized and stacked for our later use in less than

one day.

I’m still mind boggled about how long that would have taken us to do ourselves, if we even could have done it at all.

At this point the excitement was infectious. I started sketching garden layouts secretly, in the middle of the night, in the dark, not quite believing how much square footage I had at my fingertips. It seemed a little too good to be true, and a lot daunting - those same fingertips would have to shovel and wheelbarrow it all into position.

So then we started to build.

February 26th, 2020

After laying out the first couple beds…

…and moving literal tons of earth…

…the seeds we planted started to grow. A LOT!

Jess lost two tomato bets that year, to the great shock of both him and his mother - first, that no tomato plant in our garden would grow over 7 feet high, and second, that no tomato plant would fruit past the 5 foot high mark.

I grew onions for the first time, and even got some scapes! Which I did nothing with because I was so excited I just carried them around. No joke.

Side note, notice the hedge of wild tomato plants that were already collapsing my crappily jerry-rigged support trelace.

And we began our first harvests. Some were surprisingly abundant!

…and some not so much.

Jess still jokes around about how this year’s corn harvest secured not only us for the winter, but secured our children’s children for life. Hopefully I’ll be able to seed save from these because a dignity save is not an option.

We even began beautifying the vegetable garden, an entirely new concept for me that I am now (after months of slowly building up momentum) head over heels about.

Right around August, 24/7 morning sickness hit me like a ton of bricks and didn’t leave until November. In the interim, all my plans for planting a fall garden evaporated like the water in my poor greenhouse seed trays. When I finally crawled out from the donut and saltine ridden nest I’d buried myself in for three months I fully expected to have to start completely over with the dead remains of the summer plantings. What I did not expect were thriving kale and brussel sprouts, and even a surprise patch of mystery beans neither Jess or I can remember ever planting.

And as the resilience of my accidental winter garden started to take hold inside me (possibly literally, since I was making green smoothies from the kale) I started to scheme again. As a winter/early spring experiment, I covered what was once the underwhelming corn row with a layer of topsoil. I didn’t clear the stalks, I just bent them over, smooshed them down, and buried them. Then I moved our six cedar cold frames Jess had purchased early on in spring, which had spent the last six months waiting around for something to do, over top the now re-soiled corn.

I planted each cold frame up with a plethora of cold resistant veggies, and am excited (and somewhat surprised) to report germination in every single planted section. Since I sewed many of the same varieties in plugs in the greenhouse to plant out in March, I’ll be able to compare the growth and resilience of these test patches to their coddled greenhouse-started cousins.