Several years ago I had grand aspirations of lovely, manicured gardens with rows of vegetables producing most of what we eat. I even visited a friend’s garden who fed her family of six almost exclusively from her garden for the entire year. She had charts and schedules and a basement full of canning jars filled with colorful produce perfectly preserved. She even homeschooled her kids.
At the time I was homeschooling my kids too but I couldn’t ever get a handle on the crazy August garden, let alone preserve all the produce it produced between the weeds. Each year, no matter how much I expanded (yes, I said expanded because I’m a wanna be overachiever who underachieves most of the time) my garden, it was overwhelming by late summer. By 2013 I began to evaluate my need to garden and how much was too much. (Gardening friends. This is absolutely okay to do. Reevaluate!)
By that year my kids were out of school and I had been working as a food stylist for a few years. I had somehow turned a career corner. Work was coming more regularly and that meant I had less and less time to spend outside striving for perfection and bugless produce and inside preserving it for our winter pleasure. Ultimately it made more sense for me to spend the time working for money rather than working in dirt.
Last year started out well. I got the whole garden planted and paid my neighbor’s son to help me keep up with weeds and mulching throughout the summer. But, again, by August the harvest was coming in and I had no time to put anything up. A lot of it was ruined by late blight or some other preventable disease because I had no time to get ahead of anything. Much of it was wasted or if I was so inclined went to the chickens. Even with returning a 20’x25′ garden bed back to lawn (See, I understand my limitations sometimes), it was difficult to keep up. So, last winter brought more serious evaluating of the garden situation.
I decided I just can’t give it up yet so I began to wonder if anyone would like to garden with me. You know, a co-gardening situation where no one carries all the responsibility but we all share chores as well as the harvest. Sounds delightful, doesn’t it? I decided to send out a request.
A few hours later I had three friends who were seriously interested in gardening.
Here was my proposal:
I purchase all the seed, all the soil ammendments, all plants, and supplies; they show up to weed, dig, trim, tie and harvest.
The basic deal is: 1 hour of help = 1 bag of produce because you have to have some way to keep it fair and balanced.
So far this garden girls group has been a life saver for me. The last couple months I’ve had friends over working in the garden, even on days when I’m at work for 14 hours. I’ve had lovely times and conversations over planting beets and raking out beds. Every day they help get me closer to my goal of manicured gardens and bugless produce and even closer to the ultimate goal of no waste. What the four of us don’t use, we will give away to friends, family or to our church’s “Share the Harvest” table. {More on that to come in the future.}
The girls and I spent most of May and June planting and mulching with plenty of weeding thrown in there. I use both the Square Foot Gardening method as well as the Back to Eden method. The Back to Eden garden is large so it needs mulched every year. This year my husband and our friend took care of that for us.
I haven’t posted pics for a while so here are a few of us so you know the garden is not all me. They’ve spent time putting in the work too! Food styling has been SO busy I’m not sure the next time I’ll get to post here. Hang in there with me. This stuff truly is my first love but food styling pays the bills.
From left to right: Steph, Janene, (Coby’s the cute one up front), Adrienne and me!
This guy is just the sweetest thing. He comes with his “mom”, Janene, and LOVES to fetch his bouy or ball all day long. He mostly stays out of the garden rows. hehe. Mostly. 😉
Blessings, friends!