My (Hopefully Less Weedy) Homestead Garden This Year

The house is a mess and my to-do list isn’t done. The noise and chaos of late afternoon is grating on my nerves, and I need a break - a 15-minute breather to find some peace and recharge before I tackle supper and the laundry still flapping in the wind on the clothesline.

I know exactly where to find it: in my big homestead garden. I take a long handled basket with me and I head out into the bright sunshine, across the driveway, and down to my garden. I open the squeaky gate. As the wooden corner post has settled over the years, it has started to lean one way and now the gate can only open one way - by swinging it out towards me.

I walk the rows, looking for anything ready to eat that can go along with the chicken that used to roam the pasture 50 yards away, and is now baking in my oven. Three cucumbers that weren’t quite ready yesterday have had another day of heat and sunlight, and they are the perfect size for slicing today. I glance over at the tomato rows, and I see a bounty of red on my grape tomato plant. Handfuls of warm, bright grape tomatoes are soon in my basket. As I turn to go back to the house, I pass the carrot row and I notice several of them are a little too close together. I reach down and pull some up, adding to my basket while making room for the carrots still in the ground to be able to grow bigger.

I take everything back to my kitchen, where I rinse and slice the cucumbers. Carrot tops are removed, dirt is rinsed off their orange flesh, and they are ready to eat. They’re still young, small, and tender so I don’t even bother peeling them. I still smile at the fact I can harvest food just yards from my kitchen, to feed my family. I think back to how this all started for me.

When I bought my first home, I met the daughter of the couple who had lived there for the last 60 years. Both of them had recently passed away and their story was what moved me to start my first garden.

I was days away from college graduation when I closed on the place. It was a little bitty thing - 800ish square feet. No dining room, and not enough space in the kitchen for a table either. My living room was also my dining room and it had a small bathroom, 2 small bedrooms, and unfinished basement and attic.

It had a big yard though. There was a small garden plot behind the garage. The couple who had lived there before me bought the house as newlyweds, 60ish years prior. They raised 2 kids in that house and stayed there for their golden years, too.

When their daughter was telling me about the garden they kept and how many years it had been there, I could see both of them out there. Pulling weeds with mosquitos buzzing around their ears. Harvesting bright red, plump tomatoes. First as a young couple, working together. She probably wore a dress and an apron - him a button down shirt. Then with little kids playing nearby. The little kids grew into teenagers and then adults and left, and again it was just the two of them working in the garden after their day jobs.

Retirement came and they still kept their garden. A basketful of fresh veggies to be prepared for dinner and supper every day. The years kept going by, they kept slowing down, but still the garden gave them something to do - some purpose. Planting and weeding. Watering and harvesting. She told me the last year, they had but a few tomato plants in the garden. Her Mom and Dad still wanted those deep red, fresh tomatoes right from their yard.

It was on the second or third night as a home owner, standing in my yard, looking at the bare dirt in the spot that had been their garden for so long, that I decided I was going to plant a garden too. It was probably partly my Farmer DNA, itching to put seeds into the soil and have them turn into food to eat. I had spent my teenage years trying to lose that Farmer DNA, yet there I was. A homeowner in my small rural town. Itching to grow my own food.

Everything started off great! My garden was so cute. Soft black dirt with six green tomato plants, and a few sticks I was using as markers for the rows I had planted seeds in. Then one day, little shoots of green bean plants and cucumbers. Weeds were also starting to grow, but they were smaller than my plants. Then all of a sudden, it was a jungle. A full blown jungle. Had someone come along and sown some grass-and-weed-seed-on-steroids? What happened to my nice pretty little garden? Suddenly it was full of thick, 2-foot tall grass that had steel cable where the roots should have been (lol). And thus began my War with Weeds.

My attack plan has never been enough, and my garden usually ends up looking like a jungle with some green beans and tomatoes underneath the canopy. I’ve dabbled with different things in 18 years. First, toxic chemicals that I now want nothing to do with. Now, keeping the principal in mind that soil doesn’t want to be bare. Weeds are nature’s solution to a problem: bare soil.

So this year, I saved corrugated cardboard boxes all year long. Stacked them in the attic above our garage. In early-mid April, we started covering the garden with boxes, and then covering them with a thick layer of hay.

For the plants that I put in as seedlings, we cut holes where we needed the space for the plant. Starting on the left, is a row of tomatoes. Next is a row of cucumbers, and then a row that starts off with peppers, then broccoli, cabbage, and kohlrabi.

Matt helped me cut 6” lengths of 4” PVC pipe to go around my seedlings. It prevents the mulch from shifting around and totally covering the seedling which either stunts it or kills it.

We had enormous stacks of boxes, but they still weren’t enough! I had to cave and use landscaping fabric in the middle of the garden. We left 4-6” of space between rows of this stuff for planting sweet corn, green beans, and carrots. The 2 holes that are cut out are where I have 2 butternut squash plants that will run along the ground in the midst of sweet corn.

One of the things I liked about this landscaping fabric was it came with plastic washers that the staples go through. Every time I’ve tried to use landscaping fabric in the garden, the staples end up tearing it. This has worked so much better.

It’s hard to tell here, but there are 3 rows of potatoes and onions between the mulch. They had just sprouted and now we could pull all that quackgrass that was fast trying to take over the small strip of garden where the potatoes and the onions were.

3 or 4 years ago, We transplanted a rhubarb plant that was over by our grove (that Matt had mowed over several times) and also a few I got from my Mom. They really took off and this year we have rhubarb galore! I bake with it 1-2 times every week and I still can’t keep up with it.

So that’s how I’m hoping to have a better, more weed-free, low maintenance garden in 2024. I’ll take some pictures throughout the summer and update on how everything is growing, and if it has helped with the amount of weeding we have to do.