Back in the spring, my wife and I decided to try growing vegetables in our backyard for fun. With the exception of flowers and a few herbs that Alicia had grown in a window planter, we had zero experience growing anything, but we were curious to see what would happen. After watching a few videos, we bought some rolled-up fencing with anchors, a few 5-foot T-posts, and 5- and 15-gallon grow bags (I’d never heard of any of these things), as well as seeds and starter plants. Our vegetable garden experiment had begun.
After setting everything up, we adventured to grow Yukon Gold potatoes, tomatoes, Sweet Spanish onions, kale, broccoli, lettuce, and green peppers. Some of the seeds had be be started indoors under a grow light bulb and then moved outside, but eventually everything was up and growing. A few weeks later, one of our trees began to fill out, covering half of our garden with unwanted shade for several hours each day. Fortunately, the use of grow bags kept us from having to transplant everything, and I’d found T-posts easy to work with, so moving the garden to accommodate the sun was easy.
It’s nearly August now, and we’ve learned a lot from our backyard vegetable garden experiment already. The food tastes great, and we enjoy being able to step out back to grab fresh salads whenever we want. While the experiment was successful and fun, the summer temps combined with high humidity make it too early to decide whether we want to do it again next year. Maybe we’ll watch some videos on drip irrigation over the winter.