I always chuckle when I read in a garden book or magazine when it says, grow a few pots of herbs and some fresh tomato’s a garden is relaxing..
I just don’t garden that way LOL
I demand alot out of my gardens, they don’t need to be pretty like a picture but they had better produce like no tomorrow.. I got thinking about all the things I am have planned, or are working on in gardens this year and wow, I really do want alot out of it..
- Fresh eating food
- Massive amounts of extra food to be canned, dried, stored or frozen for household use
- Critter feed
- Herbs for fresh eating, herbs for drying, herbs/flowers for tea’s
- Medical herbs for house use as well as for critters needs
- Plants for coloring in soaps, or in dyeing for wool, or other materials
- Bedding, green crops, for adding to water to make plant tea’s etc
So do you garden for pleasure or do you garden to put up or do you garden to fill the pantry? Do you are garden to help you in terms of of other hobbies? Do you grow flowers to just see the pretty? or to help the local wildlife? or do most of your plants all have purpose from the tinies to the biggest?
Just another Day on the Farm 
To fill the pantry! I leave the flowers to my father who finds them relaxing. If I am putting that much work into something, I need more return than beauty!
hold on one, do you not inter plant flowers thoughout the garden for both bug issues and also for pollinators?
The flowers are important! The more I’m learning about gardening, the more I realize why our grandmothers had their flower gardens. Without flowers, no pollinators. Without pollinators, no fruits and veggies! I’ve been telling this to all the Mennonite ladies I know, because I’ve heard them wonder aloud whether they were wasting time with their flower gardens.
I could not agree more, but I do think it just makes the time spent in the garden more pleasent as well, the colors the scents, while I find many garden plants beautiful, I am of course drawn to those pretty flowers.
Like you I garden mainly for use. I do want to expand and have more herbs. I also been thinking about adding a bee/butterfly garden near the house. Hopefully this year will be better than last year.
O yes, please let this year be better then last, but is that not mantra of most gardeners, there is always something that could use more of this or that, or then there is the thing that just won’t die or quit LOL
Hey FG, the next time you think of some plant that “just won’t quit” – aka a “weed” – I dare (any of) you to look it up in that pfaf.org search link I left here the other day; ’cause if a weed is a useless plant, there aren’t many weeds…
And I bet you’re saying “Yeah right!” Well, over the past year or so, I’ve started making impressions of different plants in clay and there’s only been ONE so far that didn’t have at least one other use besides being “attractive”.
So go ahead, I DOUBLE dare ya!
Ok, Deb, I will put my thinking cap on this one and get back to you on that double Dare!! Watch for a reply soon!!
Most plants have more uses than what we’re aware of: “decorative” or “edible” is usually just the start…
Pfaf (Plants for a Future) is my favourite plant identification website (for best results use the Latin name – if you don’t know it, just ask google) for example “mint” is “mentha” and if you like mint, check this out…
http://www.pfaf.org/user/DatabaseSearhResult.aspx
You’ll be AMAZED by what you find out about what’s already growing around you.
P.S. If you’re a plant geek like me? Once you’re on their search page (no, make that before you go there) you should probably set a timer; )
thanks for the link and I will be needing to set that timer đŸ™‚
LOL!
(Did you see my challenge yet?; )
Nope, just saw it.. and I say.. hmmmmm, I need a nap before anything witty is going to come LOL
Hmm, yeah, this’ll definitely be more difficult for you than most people… You don’t see many things as “weeds” either, do you?
Sweet dreams!
I’ll be putting in my first garden this year and jumping in with both feet, as everyone knows. It won’t be a pleasure garden – I don’t have that luxury since I have NO intention of driving an hour to the grocery store in the winter. I have perennial medicinal herbs (echinacea, sage, yarrow, etc) and plenty of good, hearty vegetables – beets, carrots, corn, turnip, parsnip, squash. It will have to be a large intensive garden. My friend L laughed at my 100 seed package of corn and said I need at least 500. Oops.
Hopefully I will enjoy gardening, but even if I hate it, I have essentially the same needs as you – fresh eating, massive amounts of preserving, animal feed, and medicine.
Jumping with both feet, head over heals and then some.. I honestly don’t konw what is going to happen, I know that with the two of you home, this could work with a big old pile of work and lots of luck, but the idea that you are going to be enjoying this garden.. I just don’t know, I guess that there will be parts of it you will but its just so much, so fast, an so hard, you are going to be blindsided in so many ways, you don’t yet know where the way the wind blows, the way the water flows, where that first frost always seems to hit each year, of course only time gives those answers but it scares me because that first year in many ways is the big leanring year and I always say to folks, start small, go basic and hang on for the ride, darlin, you are going big, bold and just grapped yourself a unbroke mustang!! its going to be one hell of a ride!
Don’t worry *too* much about us. The best things in my life have happened when I’ve taken a deep breath, closed my eyes and jumped. In my forty years, I’ve had more thrown at me than most people do in five lifetimes, and I’ve survived it all and come up on top. đŸ˜€
I wish my gardens were more productive. We eat from them but I can’t say that they do much in filling the pantry, so in that sense they are as much for pleasure as sustenance.
I can understand where you are coming from as you have a very small yard but I have seen some pretty amazing things on your blog on things you are doing, do you get to take home any parts of the things being produced in the greenhouse?
I garden to produce food for my family, we then preserve that food, this year we’re starting to preserve by pressure canning as well as sun-drying, whereas before we only froze or hot water bathed. I am growing herbs and flowers as well, for teas and to attract bees and butterflies for pollination. Also because they have a hard enough time just trying to exist! They need all the help they can get! Also new this year for us is cover crops to improve the soil (and help establish a worm population), next year I’ll be growing for the chickens too. I’m also gardening with an eye towards selling my excess. I’ve purposely started a bit more than my family will need of things that I already know I’ll have a market for. If I only make seed money back, I’ll be happy.
Hi Caroyln
First, got to say, LOVE your last five posts! I so agree with many of the things you have been writing about, and as always a pleasure to see a post with your name on it come in the mail box, its always saved for when I have time to sit and read, not rush it.
I can’t wait to see how things go for you this year, in a way, you are jumping in both feet just as much as CD in the fact that you are really doing the go big! but of course in a way its quite different, you have had a year to look, learn and prep, and you also have more adults in the household, with less wee ones.
I hear you about the bee’s and butterflies, I feel the same way about my fireflys, I know it drives the farmers a bit nuts that I won’t cut down that one big “Wild area” on my farm in the spring until after the fireflies come out to play and breed and even then we just give a trim with the critters and only cut walking/working paths in that whole area otherwise, its my wild food forest đŸ˜›
Yes. I garden to eat, to fill the pantry, and to enjoy the beauty. For me, having my hands in the dirt is therapeutic. I enjoy eating. I enjoy the process of canning. I love the sense of accomplishment when I stand back and look at a picturesque garden and full pantry shelves. Not that I don’t like green and blue but my flowers furnish pleasant variety that attracts insects who provide animation. I plant squash in my flowerbeds because I like the contrast of the huge leaves with the smaller plants and squash is a vegetable garden space hog.
It is lovely is it not, sometimes I wish I had a bit more time in the garden when the push is really on, Dh and I have a system and it keeps me more in the kitchen then the garden when the harvest/preparing time really gets going, with him more in the garden at that point then me..
We live in a rented house at a main road. It has a nice piece of show garden before the house and the show must go on… So it is just spare time I can give to my precious vegetables. In the flower garden I try to squeeze in as many herbs as I can, but it is not the way I would like it.
Even being able to get the herbs into the beds would go along way but yes, I understand that on a rental that it might be alot harder.
So do you garden for pleasure or do you garden to put up or do you garden to fill the pantry? – fill up the pantry but I find gardening one of the only times I am at peace, so I guess pleasure too đŸ™‚
Do you are garden to help you in terms of of other hobbies? – yep, soap making, paper making, herbals
Do you grow flowers to just see the pretty? or to help the local wildlife? or do most of your plants all have purpose from the tinies to the biggest? – they all have to have some use
Sounds like while even the most hard core of us garden for our suppers, we still all find pleasure, peace and inner steel in doing this.. I think that is a very good thing indeed.
AMEN to that Sista!! (Mother Nature’s way of paying back; )