Is that there is always next year to look forward to. I always have big garden plans, sometimes too big. When I bought this land and decided to build a house a couple of years ago I planned for a garden space. I wanted something that would be easy to maintain and work around so I built raised beds.
The raised beds turned out to be significantly more work then I had thought (isn't everything!). The biggest problem with raised beds is finding enough soil to fill them. The soil here is very poor. It is 80% rock held together by wet, acidic clay. I suppose I could have purchased a truck load of top soil but my budget just couldn't handle buying dirt. For the past two years, I have been filling in these beds with layers of mulch, horse manure and what soil I could manage to transport from other parts of the property. I made some feeble attempts to plant a few things in my beds with very poor results. Not only were my soil building attempts still too raw but, building a house and a barn on my own was so overwhelming that nearly everything else got pushed aside. The garden most of all.
This past Spring, the soil in my beds actually started to look like soil and I had high hopes. I planted something in every bed and I did actually get a harvest. However, I still wasn't able to devote the time it really needs and as a result, my garden got completely out of control this summer. The whole thing turned into a giant morass of impenetrable weeds. I finally gave up on it and just let the weeds go until freezing temperatures beat them into submission. This past week, while we have been enjoying unseasonably nice weather, I finally tackled the garden. I ruthlessly pulled everything out of each bed, turned the soil and added a cart load of aged manure (which I finally have, thanks to the horses) to each one.
Gardening is tough, I think that everybody who gardens experiences years where nearly everything goes wrong. A few years ago the whole area was stricken with blight; we had a year of terrible drought and another of so much rain everything rotted. The thing about gardening though, is that every year you can start over, forgive yourself the mistakes you made last season, think about what you want to do different and start making plans.
