I may be slightly insane. Even though the weather has been terrible: cold, dreary, rainy, and the garden has been muddy, I have been out working in the garden and preparing for spring.
Of course I would prefer to work on a sunny, 65 degree day, but as I told my husband, if I waited around for the perfect weather I would never get anything done.
I would rather be out in the cold and rain completing the heavy work than working when it’s 100 degrees outside and I must avoid chiggers, snakes, heatstroke, and sunburn. I can always put on a coat and a hat.
I am able to continue gardening no matter how wet the soil because I do not till the soil and because I have raised beds. I have no idea when the soil will dry enough to allow a tractor to plow it, but the soil in my raised beds is workable almost all of the time.
I stand in the pathways to work so I do not compact the soil in the beds. Water pools in the pathways, so sometimes I have to wade through puddles and avoid slipping in the mud.
The rain left me with a moist seedbed above the muddy paths. I sowed seeds of kale, Swiss chard, and radishes in this bed yesterday, and I covered it with plastic. The rain that fell during the night did not wash away my seeds, thanks to the plastic, and it will give the seedlings a bit of protection from the cold.
Last night, when I went to bed, the garden beds were neatly covered with plastic. Beds covered with the white/clear plastic have seedlings inside, and the black tarp kills cover crops and weeds in preparation for spring planting.
This kale and mizuna have appreciated the protection of the plastic this winter. Drip irrigation, in the form of drip tape, irrigates the crops under the plastic.
Today was sunny and warm, but the changing weather rearranged my plastic covers. I am now off to order more sandbags so I can adequately hold down the edges of the plastic. At least I don’t have to worry about torrential rain or cold temperatures this week.
Consider making beds in your garden instead of plowing or tilling it. Some people construct beds out of wood or other materials and fill them with soil. If you have a large garden, however, wooden beds will quickly become prohibitively expensive. Instead, construct the beds by raking the soil into beds
Today I met a lovely woman who discovered that I am starting a farm.
She, like many people with whom I have discussed gardening over the years, detailed her failed attempts at growing food and said, in discouragement, that she had given up for now. I guess I made most of my failures when I was too poor to invest much money or time in the project.
I also grew up around the garden. I KNEW I could grow plants, because I had seen every relative in my family do it. I might not have the same “green thumb” my grandmothers had, but I could put a seed in the soil, and, if I did what I was supposed to, have a plant arise at the other end.
In my mind, it was sort of like cleaning the house or cooking dinner: if you have no other option, you will succeed.
Of course, most of us don’t HAVE to grow food anymore. The grocery store or the farmers market waits for us. I am starting this farm on the premise that there are people out there who don’t want to grow their own food but would rather buy it from me.
But many of us still want to grow food even though we don’t have to. Bringing in dinner from the yard is satisfying to our core: it must activate some ancient memory of hunter-gathering or just the first garden our ancestors scratched into the soil.
So when I spoke to this lady, I told her briefly what I will say in more detail here: you just have to keep trying.
I may appear to be a successful gardener/farmer because of luck, a “green thumb,” some sort of plant intelligence, or hard work. I guess it is a combination of all those things, because I can’t eliminate any one of them from my formation.
Yes, I did grow up in a family where my parents remembered the prospect of going hungry or eating limited diets if the garden did not produce. This put a sense of urgency into their gardening plans. I would not have gone hungry if my parents’ garden did not produce, but I think we all kind of forgot that we could buy corn, beans, and tomatoes at the grocery store if our garden didn’t make it.
I will have to share with you sometime the essay I wrote in carefully inked cursive, splotched with white-out when needed to cover my mistakes, in 1986, on “Why Water Conservation is Important.” I found it yesterday when unpacking boxes from our move. That summer, during a drought, our well went dry and we dammed up the creek and pumped irrigation water into a tank with which we watered the garden.
The grocery store could have provided us with food, and the public water line ran by our house, so we could tap into it, but I don’t think I realized any of this as a 12-year-old. We all struggled to keep the garden alive. My sister and I thought it was great fun to be told by our parents to go build a dam in the creek for a real purpose instead of just for play.
My parents were both schoolteachers; I do not want you to think I grew up in some sort of rural poverty where our very existence depended on the production of our garden. But their good health as children depended on the garden, and that sense of urgency is not easily erased. My parents were born on the end of the Great Depression, and the mindset that you cannot rely on the government or society to take care of you was also deeply ingrained in their (and my) psyche. Gardening was not a hobby in my family; it was a given.
When I, as an adult, began gardening, I did not start from scratch, and I was not afraid. It does amaze me at how many people are terrified that they will incur some heavenly wrath if they kill the tomato plant. Tomato plants are not puppies, nor yet are they baby humans. If they die, they become compost. End of story. They have no soul and they do not experience pain.
Decide to begin your garden, purchase seeds or plants, make a good effort to learn about them, and start the garden. If you kill them, oh well. View the investment in plants and seeds in the same way you would the money spent on a nice meal out, a manicure if you are so inclined, or seeing a movie.
All are fleeting, relatively inexpensive forms of entertainment. They cost about the same amount of money it would take to start a garden. Unlike the above pursuits, though, you have at least engaged in some exercise during the pursuit of the activity, and the gardening experience, even if it dies quickly, will last longer than any other pursuits.
To have the best chance of succeeding in your garden, start small. In April, when the stores are filled with beautiful plants, the temperature is only 70, and you have forgotten the misery of August, it is easy to purchase and to set out far more plants than you can manage.
I prefer to grow plants in the ground because they are more forgiving of neglectful watering than if they are in pots. Preparing garden soil does require a bit of work, though. You might want to search for lasagna gardening, straw bale gardening, or pursue the typical method of garden bed preparation when you till or dig the soil and add compost.
Good plants to grow in pots are lettuce and carrots in the spring, and tomatoes and peppers in the summer. Buy a large pot, fill it with potting soil (not topsoil) put in your plants, and you have an instant garden. Consistent, but not excessive, watering is imperative.
Most vegetable plants need full sun, but, especially if they are in pots, most are happy with morning sun throughout the morning that turns to shade by about 1-2 pm in South Carolina’s climate. Do not put a pot of vegetables out on your concrete patio in full sun all day long and expect them to be happy in July, especially if you forget to water them for a couple of days.
Start your garden this spring, and if you kill everything, try to figure out what you did wrong, and fix it next time. Usually the culprits are over-or underwatering, too much or too little sun, and plants that are too crowded.
We purchased the land on which our farm sits in 2017 and moved into our new house nearly a year later in 2018. In the intervening year, I made plans for the farm. (I couldn’t do much gardening, and I needed something to do besides worry about the new house and homeschool the children).
We originally chose High Point Farm for the name because the land that we purchased is near the highest point of elevation in Richland County. If you are reading this from somewhere mountainous, don’t be deceived: the elevation of the Blythewood area is only about 500 feet above sea level. The highest point is 570’ and is near our property.
The South Carolina Secretary of State’s website said High Point Farm was available for use as a LLC, and so I established a website in that name. I had a blog since 2011 and I migrated all the content from that blog to the new website.
When I was finally able to establish the LLC, I discovered that the state decided that High Point Farm was too similar to another farm name already in existence, HighPoint Farms. We began the search for a new name.
Our property has been a farm for over 200 years, and farms accumulate piles of junk. Tire graveyards, piles of bottles, and random pieces of metal litter the woods. Most of the woods are too hilly for row crops, and judging from the diameter of the trees covering the slopes and ravines, the forested area has been covered with trees for a century or more.
To stop erosion, and to dispose of trash before there was a public landfill, previous farmers through their detritus into gullies and ravines. We discovered the inspiration for our new farm name in one of those piles of debris.
This hubcap belongs to a 1937 Plymouth pickup truck, we believe, thanks to some Internet research. We found only the one hubcap in the woods, although I keep meaning to go back to the spot that we found it with a shovel to search for other parts of the truck. Perhaps the other three hubcaps are under the leaves and tree roots.
I would love to hear the story of how the hubcap arrived in the woods. Did it fall off one day, was the truck wrecked there, did the truck finally die of old age and was it pushed into a hole? Was the truck sold to someone in Blythewood who still has it, with one missing hubcap, in a garage? Perhaps surviving members of the family know the story.
Whatever the tale of how the hubcap arrived in the woods, the hubcap is now our farm signature. We searched for fonts and clip art to try to incorporate a hubcap into the logo, but we were unsuccessful. The clipart folks prefer modern hubcaps and wheels.
My daughter suggested that we put the name of the farm across the diameter of the wheel in the same way the “Plymouth” logo is across the hubcap, but we could not figure out how to make this happen, either. (We are not graphic designers!) We did have a little help with polishing the farm logo, but we came up with the basic design ourselves, which is reminiscent of a fat tire with hubcap in the center.
High Point Farm is no more, and One Hubcap Farm, LLC, is an official business, registered with the State of South Carolina.
