83. 2023 Year Review
This post has been rattling around in my head for awhile now but it has taken awhile for me to put it into words that actually made sense to me. If you had asked me in January or February of last year what my garden plan were or how I thought it would go, I would have told you that I thought this year was going to be my best year ever. Looking back now, while it was great in some ways, it wasn’t in the ways I thought it would be. It was actually a really hard year for me in a lot of ways when it comes to gardening. This year has taught me a lot of things I never knew I would need to think about.
To start off, let’s talk about the good things that came out of this year and why I thought this year would be the best year yet as far as the garden goes. 2023 was my first year working from home. I had lots of ideas of how I thought working from home was going to go but not many of those “ideas” were what actually became my reality. If you have ever worked from home you can probably relate to my words here, it’s hard to put down the work at the end of the day. When you work in the same space as your home. You can find yourself constantly working or thinking about work. It can be hard to truly rest and let it all go. This took some time to get used to. Also, going from working outside the home to now being home, I thought I would constantly be in a state of having it all together. Meaning, I thought the house would always be clean, the laundry would always get put away as soon as it was done and the dishes would magically be done. (I know that’s being over dramatic but you get where I’m going with this)
Working from home means that there are days where you are consumed with life and there are days where you are consumed with work. It is still a give and take and sometimes it takes more out of you than you realize. While I am still learning where that balance lies between the two, I am also learning to give myself grace in the middle of it all.
In giving myself more grace, I was also able to spend more time with family. Not only more intentional time with my daughter but with all of our extended family as well. I am learning that this is a gift I can never be thankful for enough.
Let’s get onto the victories in the gardening season. While I am hard on myself and I always say “you could do that better”, I did can over 150 jars of food this year. We also froze and dehydrated a lot of things as well as purchasing a quarter of a cow and two pigs. I have been so thankful for all of that so far this winter.
The weather this year was also something to be thankful for. While we had about a month of hot weather as we usually do, most of the summer was relatively mild. This allowed for great harvests from a lot of my crops.
Two negative things were my tomato yields and the weeds, both of which I hope to have a solution for this year. First off the tomato yields, I did not have a great harvest of tomatoes like I was hoping for. I think this was due to my lack of crop rotation. If you don’t know what crop rotation is, it’s basically where you move crops around in your garden space from year to year to allow different crops to utilize different nutrients. There’s a lot of science behind it and reasons why you should move certain crops behind others. To learn more about crop rotation, click here. I have always planted my tomatoes in the same place because I didn’t want to move my trellis’ since they are secured into the ground. I think after three seasons of planting the tomatoes in the same spot, they were lacking nutrients they needed in order to produce. This year they will get moved to the other side of my garden in hopes that I have better yields.
The second thing was weeds and again, this was on me. I didn’t mulch my plants like I should have and I didn’t weed when things were young to avoid the weeds overtaking everything. This year I am going to mulch my beds more heavily and plant in plastic when it comes to in ground planting.
Speaking of this year, you guys know I am starting a flower farm with my sister in law. We are in the works of prepping everything we need to start this journey. We are very excited and prayerful that we get to bless others with some beautiful flowers. While I will still be growing crops, the garden will look different this year. I still plan to bring you guys along but it may look different.
Be on the lookout next week for my 2024 seed picks! Until then, Happy Gardening!