Personal Peak Prep - Gardening

This guest post is about the personal activities and preparations of someone who’s name you might recognize, but who wishes to remain nameless here. I’ve separated it into multiple posts based on topic.

–

It’s always helpful to look back over the short-term and ask: “What have I accomplished so far?” Here is a recent list from the last 18 months:

Gardening:

We’ve doubled the size of our front yard, covered the grass, and made 6 4’x4’ square foot gardens, then added vegetables all around them. We made three other gardens about 12’x20’ in the side yard, where last year we grew tomatoes, lettuce, kale, spinach, beans, peas, broccoli, Asian greens, garlic, etc. We also grew our first fingerling potatoes.

We planted a dozen hazelnuts, a few plum & nut trees, and Korean pine nuts, (which grow very slowly, for our elderly years). The apple trees are going in next year, along with a few pear trees and several dozen berry trees. We consider apples that will store well, because we remain more concerned about how to live through the winter, than eating well in the fall. We’d like to figure out how to put in grain crops too, to feed our chickens on our own.

For fire safety sake, we took down trees within 30 feet of the house, and so this opened up more gardening space for us, and gave us two years worth of firewood. We have lots of rock and ledge on our property, so we have to build up the soil, more than just ‘dig and go.’ We also have very variable soil in some sections that go from very wet sopping soil in the spring to bone dry in the heat of the summer. Learning what will grow here is going to be a learning experiment over many years.

We’ll also be growing mushrooms in large quantities, and cool things like ‘seaberries.’ I’ve been reading up on Forest gardens, and believe this is the way to go.

–

Leave a Comment