I grew up home gardening and small-scale farming, but this past year was the first year I've had my own garden as an adult.
I feel kind of meh about it. Hard to feel like it's worth it when all we have room for is a few small raised beds and a handful of containers. The processes don't really scale down.
It's kind of like baking: I have to drag all of the equipment and ingredients out and go through all of the steps whether I'm making six cookies or six
dozen cookies. As someone who used to bake commercially, I feel nothing short of
ripped off every time I bake a small batch of something in my tiny home kitchen. With greater capacity, I could have turned the same amount of work (or possibly less) into about ten times the production output. I don't like that feeling.
That's how I felt looking at my two dozen or so strawberry plants this past summer, compared to the rolling hillsides covered in
thousands of them that I used to help grow and harvest when I was a kid.
My 2020 garden was very experimental. I grew a lot of things to learn what will grow well with our less-than-optimal soil/sunlight arrangement. Next year I'm going to scale it back quite a lot, and only grow things that will perform well and which will be substantially cheaper to grow than to buy - or where the quality differential just makes it worth it.
The star of my 2020 garden was my tomatoes. They're notoriously hard to grow around here, so I put them in containers and chose their location pretty carefully. I only had four tomato plants, but we harvested a LOT of tomatoes. We were still harvesting toward the end of October. We could have had tomatoes ripening into November, probably, if I hadn't been lazy and neglected to pick the ones that were starting to blush before the cold and rain really set in and they started getting mushy. I'm gonna grow a lot of tomatoes next year. This year we just bought starts from a local store, so the varieties weren't the best (though the "early girl" was very tasty, I might do that one again). Going to be more choosy for next year. I got really spoiled on homegrown heirloom tomatoes growing up.
I'm also going to grow more flowers - because they're something that will reliably grow in a lot of the places that aren't really suitable for crop production, as long as you plant the right kind.
I'm jelly of your move to the country. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, and living on the edge of even a "small" town is agonizing for me. My world is a noisy, cramped little fishbowl. I occasionally remind my husband that it might not be the worst thing to just a buy a piece of undeveloped land in a decently rural area and begin our homestead the old-fashioned way in a sturdy tent or a rustic cabin. I had a childhood that taught me how to thrive in primitive living situations... and an adulthood that makes me think it would be well worth doing! Would be an easy trade for me, to give up all of the "convenience" for the kind of hard work that could earn me back the
peace and quiet that I was born into. My husband is not yet sold on that.
Sorry for rambling - but that's a wonderful move! Congrats, and may your garden flourish. <3
