The Garden of Love is turning three this month! After a few months of reflection and planning, we’re excited to get back out and play in the dirt. The past couple years have been an exciting rollercoaster of learning how to grow what we need in our little home and still have time to hit the road and get out of town.
Last month, we went to the Baker’s Creek Heirloom Seed Festival for the second year in a row and came back just as inspired as year one. More than anything, we love this festival because it’s a great place to meet kindred spirits and learn about new techniques, ideas, and strains for our area. This year, we had the chance to catch a talk by some of our favorite Youtubers: Off Grid with Doug and Stacy. They are inspiring homesteaders that live in our region and we’ve learned a lot from watching their story unfold. They live on the edge of the off-grid movement with no electricity or, GASP, internet at home. Some of our favorite take-a-ways were:
The idea that physical contact with the earth, by hand or foot, and its impact on your overall wellbeing. We’ll definitely be spending even more time barefoot this year.
“Would you eat your deodorant?”
Would you? Stacy touched on the fact that our skin in the largest organ of the human body, and what we put on our body is just as important as what we put in our bodies. We’ve been switching to using homemade and all natural products with few ingredients and hope to be making more of our own soon.
The All-American Sunoven
We hope to add to our cooking arsenal soon! Energy efficient and completely practical. This is great for at home and out on the road.
After catching a great talk, we wandered through the vendors at Baker’s Creek. We went a little overboard last year with excitement and introduced several new plants into the garden with out much of a plan or understanding of maintenance. We definitely tested new limits with hops, sugarcane, amaranth, flax, quinoa, sunflowers, tobacco, and eucalyptus, amongst several new strains of plants we grew in year one. We tripled our garden size and ultimately struggled with overabundance, failed crops and fatigue.
This year, we are keeping the garden the same size, but narrowing our focus to a handful of core species to fit our lifestyle. As a homestead garden, our goal is to produce enough for ourselves throughout the year and be able to share the fruits of our labor with family and friends. Variety is important for us in our diet, below is a list of what we are growing this year. For most of the following we are growing between 1-10 different varietals, while for our peppers and tomatoes we are growing between 20-25.
What new adventures are you embarking in your home and garden this year? We’d love to know 🙂