Why yes, i did just quote Beck’s Loser. I can also sing the whole song through, with no background music. Cause i’m cool like that.
It’s not uncommon for me to fail at things, I fail at a lot of things, but these lyrics have always been my go to when trying to pump myself back up and try again, and things do change. If you go back to the original blog posts we have come such a long way from where we were, but it’s a long and slow, and very frustrating pace. Our garden last spring was much better than our garden this spring, but our summer garden is much better than the one last summer, go figure. The amount that we have learned between these two seasons is immense. We have completely redone how we are farming our raised beds in order to foster soil biodiversity in order to increase production. Right now we know that the soil is not optimum, but we have some ideas how to fix it, which we will be sharing with you along the way.
With these setbacks it’s been hard to get out and really work the garden the way that I want to. I’ve mainly been frustrated with our inability to water the garden. We haven’t had enough water in our house cistern to be able to justify hooking up a hose, and we haven’t been able to find a 100 ft hose for less than $50 since the pandemic started. Our second choice is to find a way to hook up a hose to the 250 gallon cistern we use to fill ours when we run out of water. The problem is that it’s not our cistern. We borrowed it from a friend who wasn’t currently using it. I have been contemplating purchasing a 100-200 gallon cistern just for this purpose and hooking a hose to it. We could fill it with city water from the fill station down the road whenever we have a stretch of several days without rain. The problem with that is that this all requires money, money that we don’t have. Especially since I’m not going to be working again for the near future because I have to be home with the kids. I’m also in need of tomato stakes (i have about 10-15 plants that still need to be staked), cover crop seeds, we need to increase our beds by at least 5 next year, but preferably 9. We would also like to put in a small shed to put our gardening supplies and allows for water collection into a cistern so we don’t have to fill the tank from the filling station. We also need to buy a honey extractor, build a honey house, etc….
But despite these setbacks we were able to get out there and weed eat, stake the tomatoes we did have stakes for, trellis the cucumbers, weed all the beds, and plant the fall direct sow seeds and fall cover crops (buckwheat). My hope is to salvage some sort of a harvest this year.
We have been doing a really great job of saving our money to pay for all these things ourselves, but it’s been a long and slow process. We still plan on continuing in this way, but we started the Patreon with the idea that our readers could help advance the farm, and the book, while getting something out of it themselves.
Running a farm is hard, and it’s expensive, and we don’t want to hide any of that from our readers. We all fail at things. We sometimes fail at the same thing multiple times before we get it right, but the trick is to keep trying, and to make sure that you are open and honest about your mistakes. There was a time in my life when I was told that the only way to be successful is to make people believe that you are already successful and that nothing in your business is going wrong, but what’s the point in that? Life isn’t perfect and business is HARD, but I want you to learn from my mistakes too, and be confident in learning from your mistakes, because I sure do!
