Vegetable Farm

When we cleared the area for the greenhouse (which needs full sun) – we found we had created some sun for growing vegetables. We had never contemplated growing vegetables before as we had too much shade from the trees. However when you live on a hill, you don’t have much flat ground so this embarked us on terracing a large area for the new garden area with railway tie retaining walls and steps. This presented a bit of a challenge as we had never done anything like this before. After watching some YouTube videos and lots of work – the end result turned out excellent

We had no experience whatsoever at growing your own vegetables so were prepared learn by doing. We decided on raised garden beds and then had to decide on how many. This first year we brought seeds on everything we liked and then started the seeds in the greenhouse. That was not our only mistake. Most of the seeds germinated so we had seedlings coming out of our ears. So we filled the whole area with raised garden beds to accommodate all the seedlings. We learnt that you do not plant 65 tomato bushes – we had more tomatoes then what could do with. We now buy just the seedlings of the quantities we need and have a bigger variety. We did learn a lot this first year and had some successes along with the failures. Unless the carrots we brought were just baby carrots these were put into the failure category. However when we were pulling up the carrots we noticed a furry patch amongst the carrots. When we removed it we discovered three baby rabbits that were just about ready to leave the nest. We replaced the fur and let them be but they were gone when we checked on them a couple of days later.
At the moment (December 2016) we have all the cool weather vegetables growing like Lettuce, Cabbage, Spinach, Kale, Cauliflower, onions & Brussel sprouts.
We numbered every raised garden bed to help with keeping records for crop rotation to reduce pests and diseases.