Starting a Garden from Scratch

It’s been a busy few weeks. Amidst building new garden beds, compost heaps, worm farm and sowing seeds – we have made a couple of unexpected trips back to the coast to help my mother in law who became very ill. Thankfully she is now recovering well. Then we had the shipping container arrive and have been unpacking and sorting all of that, a little bit here and a little bit there. Despite the delays it has been fun getting our feet on the ground (literally and figuratively) and begin to see the gardens take shape.

I feel like a little girl all excited and wanting to do it all at once! But of course that is neither sensible nor possible. We must start small and build as we go. So we are focusing largely on the house block at the moment. I’m busting to get chooks, and hopefully that will happen in a few weeks, but first there were repairs to be done on the chook pen, deep bedding to put in and I must try to learn patience.

So far we have planted five garden beds. One bed was a quick crop of seedlings that we bought back from the coast. We have already been enjoying a daily harvest of lettuce and bok choy. This garden bed took a while to really thrive as it was the bed I did the least amount of soil prep on. I had to coax it along for a couple of weeks with seasol. But then it took off and is now doing well.

Then I planted a bunch of seeds to put in the next couple of garden beds. I enjoyed tucking all the seeds into their little beds, praying over them, watering them and then waiting expectantly for them to show their little green heads. The children seemed to love it too and would come out every morning with me to check if any had arisen from their warm brown beds. It was very exciting and satisfying to watch them slowly emerge and then grow strong. I did have a couple of fails. I planted some old seeds that didn’t sprout at all. Also my daughter (who LOVES flowers) and I, sowed a few pots of flower seeds which sprang up quickly but then didn’t continue to grow but sort of stagnated. Not sure what the problem was there but we will try again. It may have been that I waited too long to thin them out.

Also during this time I tried my hand at propogating a few cuttings that we had been given from friendly locals. Some I stuck straight in the ground but some we started with a mix of cinnamon and honey and some with saliva. Results were mixed but the cinnamon and honey seemed the most successful. A fun little homeschool garden experiment.

Most of the yard was just bare grass when we arrived so we had a lot of work to do in preparing garden beds and the soil for those beds. We decided to build ‘no-dig’ garden beds. The first step was to airate the soil with a garden fork, then lay down whatever organic matter we had available. This included everything from branches that had been trimmed, to vegetable scraps, leaf rakings, lawn clippings, manure that we collected from a local property, etc. Then we covered this with a thick layer of either cardboard or newspaper. This was wet down then covered with soil (which we carried in buckets – no wheelbarrow yet – from an old garden bed at the back of the yard), then more manure and straw was added. We let this sit for a couple of weeks before planting. The soil really wasn’t very good quality. It could more accurately be called dirt than soil. No life in it. Just dry rocky dirt. But it is all we had, and with a limited budget we were determined to work with what we had. From everything we have read we understood that by adding all the organic matter to the garden bed, along with the manure, we could rebuild the soil.

It has proven to be true. Garden beds 2 and 3 that we prepared this way have been far richer and quicker to thrive than the first garden bed that needed a lot of extra help. The only other thing we did, apart from plant those lovely seedlings in the soil with a handful of compost, was to put up some temporary shade cloth to shield our little crop from the scorching central Queensland sun, which we had been warned about. So far we have planted radish, silver beet, lettuce, parsley, marigolds, tomatoes, okra, sunflowers, eggplant, capsicum, to name a few.

We were also really blessed when a lovely local couple gifted us some banana saplings. We trimmed them right back and planted the bulbs in the ground (upside down as we were taught in the syntropic farming course) and much to our delight they all shot up a few short weeks later!

Now it is water, weed and watch. Waiting for that beautiful harvest when the time is ripe. These are early days but it has been a joy to work together as a family and watch our little garden and home take shape.

First posted November 21, 2021