I come from a family where agriculture flows through our veins. Growing up, I would visit my grandparents on their 100+ acre dairy/crop farm and dream of the day that I would become a farmer. As the years went on, my family and I lived near agriculture, but never really on a farm. We lived in Lexington and Nicholasville, Kentucky, but it wasn't the same as being on my grandparents' farm, mainly because we didn't have cows, or fields of corn or tobacco or whatever...
Instead of developing into a farmer, I developed into a nerd. I don't think the word "nerd" is a derogatory term. In fact, I wear the badge proudly. I love Star Wars, Star Trek, web comics, science, Dungeons and Dragons, and nerdiness in general.
But I still longed for the country, for working with my hands, for getting dirty.
Earlier this year, I lost my job. I had been working for two and a half years as a model home sales consultant. Not really the ideal job for someone who wanted to get their hands dirty, but you gotta do what you gotta do to feed your family. Well, once the money was no longer coming in, my wife Naomi and I decided that we would plant a few things in order to try to help out our grocery bill.
You see, we've had a garden for the last few years. It's always been okay, but it ends up becoming an overgrown mess by the end of the summer, mainly because we neglected it after finding out we were going to be parents two summers in a row! Now that our kids are starting to eat things other than rice cereal and milk (for our youngest) and eating table food (for our oldest) we decided it was time to get serious. We needed to set an example for them and eat healthy. For a nerd, that's a challenge. We like bacon and starches, not green stuff. We, however, don't want our kids to end up unhealthy, so we have to eat like we want them to eat.
So this nerd became a farmer.
After replanting the garden at the beginning of the summer, I have worked hard to make sure it stays in a good condition. There are pictures out there of our garden before we got in there and pulled weeds to plant and they were, no kidding, 6 and a half feet tall. I have worked diligently to make sure they stay out, but inevitably they're back. So I decided: after this growing season, that space is going back to grass and we're going the raised bed route. I have just gotten done planting our first round of seeds, and hopefully we will get some results.
I'm sorta following the square foot gardening recipe, but I haven't read the book, so I'm winging it. We have 4 gardens, each about 4'x4', so 16 separate square feet in each for a plant to grow. In future posts, I will go into further detail on what is in each garden, and what I may have done correctly (and most likely incorrectly) and the results of them.
I'll leave you with a picture of our four brand-spanking-new beds. As I posted on Facebook, "In the beginning, there were beds..."
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