The past couple years have been a struggle to do any meaningful gardening. Michelle was too busy with the kids and neither child was independent enough for her to do any work in the garden. I was busy with unpredictable schedules at work along with various injuries. This year with rising costs and a different food shortage each week, we decided we needed to grow some of our food again. I should point out that we didn’t take any years off from gardening, but the past two years. Each year we would start a garden, but lack of maintenance would leave us with some tomatoes and a whole lot of weeds.

Last year I tried to set up more infrastructure in our side yard for gardening. I built two 4 foot by 8 foot raised beds out of 2 by 6 pressure treated boards and filled them with top soil from the local farm store. The reasoning behind this was to help prevent pests like rabbits from getting into the garden by raising them up. Our soil here is also primarily packed clay so it makes it hard for plants to root the best, so raising the soil level gives the garden plants some room to start rooting before getting into the clay soil.

This year to add to the garden, I bought rolls of chicken wire fence to go around those garden beds and quite a few bags of wood mulch to help build more soil. We also put some compost manure into both of the raised beds from store bought and also some from my parent’s dairy farm. We filled the raised beds with more top soil and added the compost before putting down about two inches of natural wood mulch. Unfortunately we only have the two raised beds and we need more space than that for the variety of plants we wanted, so we had to choose some varieties that would do better in the clay soil without issues with the pests. As much as I would have loved to build two more beds out of lumber, this year due to the lumber shortage, it was hard to justify paying the inflated price even if I could find the lumber I wanted. Our solution, we planted seed potatoes and cucumbers directly into the ground behind the raised beds. In the raised beds we planted heirloom green beans in one full bed because our kids all love green beans and we go through a lot weekly, the second bed was planted with one row of tomatoes and scattered bell and jalapeno pepper plants. Another set back was that all our seedling tomato and pepper plants didn’t survive the longer cold spring this year, so we ended up just buying some commercially grown seedlings for those plants.

Through the grow season, we kept up better on weeding this year. Stupid me, I did not put the chicken wire around any of the beds from the start. Without the chicken wire, all of our first two plantings of beans were destroyed by the rabbit population. The reason it took so long to put the fence up was because after the first planting was eaten by rabbits, the second planting lasted two months before any damage was done. With the third planting, the summer heat was not optimum and stunted all but one of the new bean plants. The pepper plants had almost the opposite effect we believe, the temperature was not consistent enough to ensure the plants to grow much larger than when we purchased them from the local farm store. The peppers did thankfully fruit, but none of the peppers reached normal mature size before ripening. The jalapenos ripened decently and were just smaller than normal, the bell peppers however did not ripen to the correct color, only getting to yellow or orange instead of red. Tomatoes are tomatoes, they grew fine and we even had 20 or more volunteer pop up from last year that caused us to have to thin out the tomato plants. Outside of the beds, the potato plants thrived or so they appeared to. The ground was hard from the clay, they did not produce much in the way of potatoes. The cucumbers had yellowing leaves and stunted fruit leading us to believe they were deficient in nutrients. At first I was thinking that they may have contracted a virus like the mosaic virus, but their flower blossoms looked perfect even as the whole plant looked like death.

What we learned from this year will help us next year. Next year the chicken wire will be going up with the first planting to avoid feeding the bunny population. We will definitely put down a could more inches if wood mulch everywhere we plant to keep building soil. Before winter sets in this year, we are planning on testing the soil behind the raised beds to see what they are deficient on. We already have plans of covering that area with 6 to 8 inches of compost/compost manure mix in the fall, but once we know what nutrient we are lacking, we will add some natural supplements for those as well. Where the potatoes had trouble in the clay, I will probably dig about a 6 inch trench and fill it with a mix of compost, mulch, and maybe a little sand before adding the other 6 to 8 inches of compost to the top soil. As is normal, we are already looking at seeds and varieties of plants we want to grow next year. We had decent crop, although be it small, of peppers with store bought seedlings; we will probably save some of our time next year growing pepper seedlings and just buy more. Not sure if any of our lessons learned this year help you, but we wanted to share our struggle.

*Affiliate links for Amazon and/or other retailers are in this post*