Our Family's First Garden Journal!

Hey there fellow HiveGardeners! As I have only recently joined the HiveGarden community, I thought it only fitting to post our family's very first entry of our Garden Journal, which happens to also be the first real garden my fiance and I have ever planted! We're ecstatic to say the very least, and I am super excited to share what we've been working on!

_{The highlight of our garden this Journal entry! More on these in a bit!}

First and foremost, before we even get into this Journal entry, I would like to take a second to recognize and say thank you to all of the curators of my "Introduce Yourself" blog post that I published last week. Thanks to you, and all of your support, you have made this publication of our Garden Journal possible! For that I sincerely and humbly thank you, and hope that I can provide engaging and informative content to the community!

I personally want to thank @generikat for the follow, and for your recent and awesome post about how you plant your potatoes, which gave me more than a few good ideas for next year! (Sadly, I already planted my taters before joining Hive!)

I also want to thank @daltono for the follow, both on here and on Twitter, helping support my growth as a content creator, and for being a huge contribution to the publication of this post. Thank you so much bro, your amazing!

And once again, thank you @nicksmitley for bringing me into this wonderful community! Can't wait to do a collaboration with you one of these days!

Now then, with that out of the way we can finally move on to the real reason you stopped by:

Our Garden!

Since this is the first entry of our journal, as well as our first garden, this post may get kind of dry in some places, but don't worry, I will try to spritz in some fun along the way! (I know, I know..that was bad haha)

Terrible puns aside, I want to start by lightly digging into our gardening background, then I'll go a little deeper into our setup. (Aw shoot, I did it again!) After that, I'll discuss our trial method we used for planting and what plants will be going into the garden this year!

Finally, as a little community engagement exercise, I will finish up with a few questions that my fiance and I personally have for the more experienced gardeners out there!

A Brief Background

So, as I've said, this is our first real garden that we'll be planting this year, but for context, we have planted some different peppers and tomatoes in 5-gallon buckets on our back patio at our old apartment in the past. Our patio was too small for grow boxes, so the buckets worked for space that we had, but we knew we wanted more!

Disclaimer I'm not saying that patio gardens are not real gardens, I just mean physically picking out a spot and tilling the land strictly for gardening purposes.

Anyways, the patio garden got started because my previous employer had a greenhouse, and had unintentionally started far too many plants for himself to use, so he gave me some a few banana pepper, cherry tomatoes, bell pepper, jalapeno, and a few miscellaneous tomato and pepper sprouts that never really produced much, so I'm really not quite sure what they were.

He gave me the buckets and dirt from his farm, and I just transplanted them all and went from there. I didn't have to worry too much about weeds since they were in the pots either so that was nice, but you could tell the plants weren't thriving like they should have.

The banana peppers and jalapenos had a very decent yield all season for the size of the plant (they were in bigger pots, and we're able to fully mature) and we had more than enough for our family; the cherry tomatoes did produce fairly well, but not nearly enough because we can never seem keep tomatoes for long in our house!

Then, in December of 2021, when we inherited my fiance's childhood home from her parents, we knew immediately we were going to go all out on a garden this year!

Our Current Setup

So with our patio gardening behind us, this year, my fiance and I tilled a 12 foot wide by 40 foot long plot in our backyard, strictly dedicated to our goal of becoming self-sufficient over the course of the next few years because let's be honest here, with all things, gardening included, learning takes time!

_{This is my favorite memory in the garden this year! Tyler Junior attempting to till with our little 2-stroke Mantis ♥️}

As to the size of the garden, I'm not sure if we tilled too large of an area for what we'll be doing, but we do plan on having an assortment of different types of plants, and I wanted to make sure we had enough room for everything to have enough room to maximize the yield of each plant!

The reasoning behind this is that, due to the current state of the economy, we want to start canning our produce as well; with the hopes that we will not only be producing what we want to consume, but also have a nice supply for the winter months!

_{Don't mind the slide and toys, Junior was having fun "helping out" in the garden that day!}

About one-third of our garden was tilled with our little Mantis (from the gif above!), but the ground proved too hard, and we eventually borrowed our neighbors tiller that made some pretty light work of the rest! (I'll try to get some pictures of that bad boy at a later date)

Trial Planting Method No. 1

Now that you have an idea of what kind of an area we have to work with, we can shovel our way into the trial method were using this year! Since we are both fairly new to gardening, I've been utilizing a few garden companion style mobile apps (Which, since I'm still figuring everything out, I'm unsure if I'm allowed to name those apps?) to help me start out and get a good basis of when to plant. They also provided some good information on different companion plants to give me an idea of where I should plant our seeds!

During this research, I found two interesting methods of planting; one by dividing your garden into one foot by one foot sections, and planting only a specific number of plants inside those squares, and the other by planting your crops in a triangular pattern.

Apparently, both methods can potentially increase the yield of each plant, and I thought the were both good ideas and made sense, but, due to the variety of plants in our garden and being the person that I am, I took it a step further! I divided my garden into one foot by one foot sections, planted a specific number of seeds into a designated square, and then skipped a square between each plant!

Other than a few plants that were transplanted as starts, all the other "cold weather" plant seeds that have been started in our garden were sowed directly into the tilled dirt, just using my finger to poke holes in the dirt and covering them, and then sprinkled with an all purpose vegetable fertilizer used as directed on the package!

Our Plants

Due to the fact that we've still had some pretty cold weather so far this year, and with the info I found in the apps I was using, we officially started our garden on April 17, 2022! I wish that I would have joined Hive before we started planting, because we would have taken pictures of the planting process! But, we do still have the warm weather plants to start soon, so I'll be sure to take some good pictures then!

All in all, we transplanted asparagus, onions, and a few potatoes that we purchased from our local Rural King store, and since we're both newbies to this scale of gardening, we just transplanted each of them as directed on the packages. The way we saw it, we couldn't possibly go wrong by simply following the directions, right? Lol

The asparagus was first to go in since it would take the longest to mature, and we transplanted a total of 6 plants: three Mary Washington, and three Jersey Giant into the first two rows. We planted one per square section (I mentioned the certain amount of plants per section above in the growing method), leaving some space for strawberry plants (which unfortunately got squished by Junior during one of our daily waterings) and bell peppers, which will be getting planted later on this month!

_{This picture was taken on May 1st, and while I realize that it will take approximately 2-3 years for asparagus to be ready to harvest, I haven't noticed any visible difference in the plant itself, but I'll continue to monitor them and provide updates!}

Next, I moved onto lettuce and spinach. For lettuce, I read that you can have 16 per one foot section, and for spinach you can have up to 9 per section. For these, I did sow that specific amount of seeds per section into the next row. We planted three sections of lettuce, left a few sections of space for banana peppers. (Which will also be getting planted later on this month)

Once we finished up the lettuce, we went right into the spinach on the opposite side of the plot (again, leaving room for warm weather plants) and planted 3 sections, with approximately 9 seeds in each section.

With the spinach planted, I decided that our tomatoes would get planted in the next few rows. Since they are warmer weather plants, and couldn't be planted for at least another month at the time, I quickly sectioned off about 5 more feet worth of space dedicated solely to tomatoes, because I said earlier, we can't ever keep them around for long!

Moving passed the empty space that was now designated "matey land", we went right into sugar snap peas! A total of 8 plants can be grown per section, so I quickly planted 4 sections worth, and then got going on the broccoli. You can only have one broccoli plant per section, so those three sections went by pretty quick.

_{Peas are starting to look good too!}

Once the broccoli seeds were in, we moved on to beets (my fiance's favorite), which can have a total of 9 plants per section. Planting a total of four sections, we decided to move on to carrots! Being able to have up to 16 carrot plants in one section (which seems absurdly high to me personally), we planted a total of three sections, although, since Junior started helping about that time, I'm unsure exactly how many seeds actually got sown into those holes. Unfortunately at the time of posting, I have not noticed any sprouts for the broccoli, beets, or carrots :(

After leaving some space after the carrots for okra, next up were the onions and potatoes! I read that you could have up to 16 onions per section, and up to 4 potatoes per section. I thought that was a lot personally, especially for just starting out, so I didn't plant near that many!

For the onions, we planted a total of 4 bulbs per section, and each bulb had a decent sized sprout starting to form already at the time of transplant. I must say we love onions in our household, and use them in almost everything we make (hooray for antioxidants!), so we have 10 sections in total. 6 sections of Reds, 2 sections of Yellow, and 2 sections of White!

_{I absolutely love the growth and progress that these onions have made in just a few weeks since the transplant!}

For the potatoes, which I believe we're russets, we waited until they had good eyes on them, and threw the whole tatie in a hole and covered it up. We only planted 2 per section in the first two sections, and 3 taties in the last section. I must say, I was really nervous about the taties at first (as I was all the plants really since it's our first time growing most of them), but after reading that post by @generikat that I mentioned earlier, my nervousness quickly passed!

_{It seems I didn't have too much to be nervous about! To be honest, I can see visible growth almost every day with these guys! It's truly amazing to see Mother Nature work her magic!}

After the potatoes, we planted three quick sections of cauliflower to wrap up the cold weather plants. Only one plant can be grown per section, so we sowed a seed into three separate sections and called it a day! So far, no cauliflower sprouts have been sighted.

_{This picture here is just a basic overview of where we planted so far, and at the bottom edge, you can even see the flowers of the potato plants! :) The rebar stakes will be used to support a basic fence of chicken wire to help prevent unwanted critters out of the garden and eating our plants!}

All of these first few pictures of our sprouts were taken on May 1st and May 3rd, so right around 2 weeks after the initial transplant and seed sowing! We were so excited to see this little bit of progress on all of these plants, we both started to sprout smiles! And as a side note, I do need to weed, but I wanted to make sure that everything sprouted first, to make sure we didn't pull anything we weren't supposed to!

As I've mentioned, once the weather does start warming up a little bit more in the coming weeks, we plan on starting a few different types of tomato seeds that will hopefully produce more than enough for our tomato loving loving family! We also plan on planting okra, banana pepper, bell pepper, jalapenos, sweet corn, zucchini and cucumber seeds as well! (Future updates coming soon!)

Questions For My Fellow HiveGardeners

Since Hive is all about engaging with others, I do want to leave a few questions for my fellow HiveGardeners as a community engagement exercise! I'm doing this with the hopes of learning some new insights, tips and/or tricks that the more experienced gardeners out there may have discovered throughout the seasons, and to also hear about all the different views and opinions from around the globe! While replying is always optional, I do hope to hear from you! :)

1. What methods do you prefer to use to start your seeds? Germinating inside, or planting directly outside as I have done?

2. What kind of spacing do you use between your produce, and what plants do you tend to grow together? (Example: my onions grown directly next to my potatoes)

3. Are there any specific crops that you prefer to grow in separate containers, away from the rest of the garden? (Like garlic or different herbs)

4. What natural or non-harmful methods have you found from keeping unwanted visitors, such as rabbits and squirrels, out of your garden other than fencing? (Example: specific types of plants, scarecrows, noise makers?)

5. Are there any natural or non-herbicidal methods you use to help keep weeds at bay? (We have a little one on the way, and we plan to cook and mash our produce for baby food when the time comes!)

Final Thoughts

Thank you to everyone who took the time to read my first Journal Entry, in what I hope will, eventually, lead to a Collection of Garden Journals! I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day, and an amazing week! Happy Gardening!

• Signature was custom made and created by @doze! I love the work he did on my personalized signatures, and can't wait to see what else this amazing creator comes up with next! Visit his page for more information on how you can get your very own custom made signature! Or click here to view the original post!

• All photographs used in this post have been taken, created and edited using my trusty cheap-o Motorola Moto G Stylus.

• GIF of Tyler Junior edited from a video using GIF maker app for Android.

• All images resized using Image Size - Photo Resizer app for Android.