My Dad loves to say there is nothing like gardening to make you humble. So true! In the spring of 2021 I was overcome with a serious desire to grow food. Maybe it was the global covid pandemic that left us with uncertainty as we saw supply chain problems and grocery store shelves missing things we needed.
This wasn’t my first rodeo when it came to gardening. A year prior I had built a large greenhouse and every February I had been starting my own seeds. What was different this year Is I had the idea I was going to try and make money doing something I enjoyed.
As I was putting together plans and trying to figure out how I would keep up with the labor and a full time job my brother called and asked if I had need for a “farm hand”. I told him my desire to try running a market garden and he was in. Apparently he had been thinking along the same crazy lines.
I devoured YouTube channels and podcasts dedicated to market gardening and purchased numerous books. My brother and I doubled the size of the garden and hauled in thousands of dollars of compost using a borrowed dump trailer. We tried compost from Salt Lake, Bountiful and the Layton Transfer Center. I had our soils tested and then we tried no till / low till methods using cardboard and compost, I purchased a tilther for prepping soil, silage tarps for smothering weeds, organic amendments for adding needed nutrients, wobblers for overhead irrigation and thousands of feet of drip tape. I put my cement mixer to use making special soil recipe for soil blocking and filled the green house with neat rows of compressed soil each with a little indentation were a seed was carefully placed.
We were off to a great start the greenhouse sprung to life with all kinds of greens, tomatoes, eggplants, squash, melons, flowers and herbs. Outside beds were filled with cold weather crops like kale, COS lettuce, radishes, turnips, carrots, kohlrabi etc.
Mother nature threw us a curveball. For some reason I live in a strange temperature sink hole different from even people just up the street. With water pipe freezing temperatures hitting us in June after I had turned off the greenhouse heater I lost a number of plants. Then when we had our lettuce nearly ready to harvest temperatures swung unseasonably warm and before being able to harvest our lettuce turned bitter. While we had read good recommendations about directly planting into the cardboard / compost beds it didn’t work for us. Our plants struggled and stalled in our newly formed beds. We spent weekends and early morning washing and prepping produce and probably working at a rate of 3 dollars and hour or less. This was ok because we were having fun and had full time jobs as well. This was just a hobby we told ourselves.
Mid summer hit and the mosquitoes and heat were unbearable. The racoons and skunks devoured every melon and corn cob as it hit its peak for picking. My brother waved the white flag and it was just too much for me to handle on my one.
Ok mother nature, you win, “Uncle”.
While I wont give up gardening I have a more realistic appreciation for the effort involved in Market Gardening and this year plan to garden just for fun.