Farm

Gardening Mistakes, Lessons, and More

On May 13, 2022 by Mary

The last couple weeks here at Iveyshire have been packed full. Between the usual mom-of-three duties, working on the garden, spring cleaning inside and out, and trying to maintain some semblance of a social life, I’ve been pretty consistently exhausted.

Maybe it’s my personality, or anxiety, or the combination of too much coffee and too little sleep, but sometimes the everyday tasks and stressors can leave me feeling pretty burnt out.

It’s really just life. But in the moment it can feel like a lot.

I think the homesteading lifestyle can be glamorized, and almost over-simplified at the same time. Yes, life IS simpler and more peaceful in many regards. I stay home with my babies, we work in the garden together, we cook together. But it’s also a lot of hard work. It’s unexpected things happening constantly. It’s having a huge to-do list, and never enough hours in the day to get everything done.

Homesteading Babies

When I start feeling like things are getting more complicated or chaotic than they ought to be, I try to remind myself that our family is still so new to this. We’re homesteading babies! It has been less than a year since we started this journey.

There are a lot of beginner mistakes to make. No matter how much advice you take in, how many books you read or videos you watch, some knowledge just doesn’t come until you’ve gotten your hands dirty and tried something that didn’t work. And when you have friends and family asking you for updates, and are trying to share your journey with strangers on social media at the same time… it can be kind of embarrassing to admit when you’ve done something wrong.

But my goal with this blog has always been to be real and honest. I’m not trying to make it seem like we’re experts, or have all the answers. I want people to join us on all our adventures while they grow in their own journey. That being said…

Oops.

Here are some gardening mistakes I’d like to share in the hope that someone can benefit from it. If I can keep just one of my readers from making the same mistakes, then it’s worth it.

Some of the smaller mistakes have honestly just been part of the learning curve of gardening in a different climate/planting zone. The first one being that we tilled the ground too early. This meant that the lovely, loosened soil was a perfect place for weeds to make their home. Last week when I was planting, it was taking me about an hour for every single row to just pull out enough weeds to to sow seeds. It was way more time consuming than it should have been.

Our first round of pests also joined the narrative this past week. Flea beetles seem to be the main bugs for now. I had never even heard of them before! Now as I’m watching teeny holes appear on the leaves, I’m quickly learning all about them.

Lesson Learned

And then there’s the biggest “oops” to date. After doing some research, I told my husband that I thought a good weed barrier for our situation and garden size would be straw. So that’s what we went with. It looked great, and seemed like it would be perfect.

But after a week of warm weather and consistent watering… Oh. My. I literally felt sick to my stomach when I realized what was happening. I’d ended up basically sowing a hayfield in the entire garden. I don’t know if that straw was particularly seed-packed, or I didn’t make a thick enough layer, or what in the world went wrong. But it was super frustrating and undid a lot of work real fast! Typing “why is my straw garden mulch growing” into Google was not something I ever thought I’d do.

After doing some extensive internet searching, and discovering other poor souls who experienced the same thing, we came up with a game plan. We’re going to rake up what’s there, pull up some of the sprouted stuff for the chickens to eat, lay down packing paper/cardboard over any leftover sprouts, and layer the rest of the straw back on top of that. It’s a mess. But hopefully it can be remedied quickly and not set us back too far.

Some Positives

Despite all the busyness and chaos of trying to be a good wife, mother, homemaker, friend, blogger, gardener, and animal owner, it’s still been rewarding. I have to say, there’s something very satisfying about going to bed at night with sun-kissed shoulders and tired muscles, knowing you worked hard and made progress toward a goal.

It may be a little messier and tougher than I originally expected, but we’re living our dream. This is why we moved to Tennessee in the first place- to try something new, and to build our family and home life into a homestead.

I wish it involved more calm, beautiful, social media-worthy moments. (You know, the kind where kids collect eggs gently instead of breaking them in the hallway outside their bedroom door?) But I guess you can’t have three kids and a homestead and expect a lovely, picturesque setting all the time.

So while there are plenty of moments that push me to my breaking point, make the tears of frustration flow, and have me calling my husband in a panic… I guess that’s all part of it. And the important thing is to take it all in, and somehow learn to become a better person in the process.

Just take it one day at a time. It’s really the best any of us can do- and all God asks of us, too.

Time for me to get back to the garden and yank out some straw. Have a great day, y’all!

Be sure to follow along with our day to day adventures on Instagram @iveyshireblog.

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