Do you remember my very first garden, back in 2014? And then it expanded a little in 2015. By 2016 (the last garden update here), I’d grown the garden as much as I would at my previous apartment. That was such a great beginning!
Now, I’m in my 8th year gardening and my 3rd garden season living in my house. This year, like every year before it, the garden has kept expanding. It’s probably about 6-7 times as big now, and I haven’t yet hit my limit.
We purchased our home at the end of summer in 2018. Above, you can see the first garden beds that Peter built me, made of dyed concrete hand-formed into molds he built. This was the extent of the 2019 garden! I mostly grew tomatoes, peppers, and herbs.
In 2020, we built four more “official” garden beds in the backyard (you can see them being put together above, behind the fence). I also started some seeds inside for the first time.
The above plot was an “unofficial” garden bed last year – a random plot of sunny ground that I turned over, in order to test some new things in – carrots and garlic! I got a small handful of baby carrots, and 44 bulbs of garlic. So exciting!
Last year’s garden definitely was a leap forward in harvests. In August, I was getting fairly large harvests with lots of tomatoes, with some peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, herbs, and more.
This was the first meal that I’d almost completely grown myself, with homegrown cherry tomatoes, acorn squash, and beans. Guys, it was so delicious!
2020 was also the first year that I ever uploaded videos to YouTube. I made a handful of garden tour videos throughout the summer and fall of last year, to show close friends and family the progress of everything growing. This year, I want to also share it with you. My first public YouTube video is definitely not professional quality (today I learned how to cut together clips, make jump cuts, and insert photos into videos for the first time!), but I’m not going to let perfection get in the way of progress. Hopefully the next video will be better (and I’ll remember to film it with my phone sideways!). 🙂
The 2021 garden is already so much bigger than the 2020 one, with lots more seeds being started indoors, a new garden bed for garlic growing in the front yard, and lots of epic new container gardening. Watch the video below if you’re interested in seeing the pre-season tour and see the garden grow with me this year!
