Life Before the Farm

For the first few years living in our house I didn't have any aspirations to do anything other than grow a garden. A big one. All the while, not really take advantage of all of the produce that we were growing. I am pretty sure that we ate a fair amount of the tomatoes, beans cucumbers, zucchini...but at that time I did not really have the time or energy to preserve anything. So we just ate what we could and gave some of it away or composted a lot. When we lived at the last house I did make the effort to freeze a bunch of green beans - there were so many...the freezer was full of beans! At least I know that I can get it done. 

Anyway, I always had flowers in the garden. This was before it became a thing to pay attention to the pollinators in the garden. Well, maybe it was a thing, but it sure wasn't with me. There were so many flowers one year that someone stopped and asked if they could harvest some of the Cosmos for an upcoming event (it may have been a wedding). It was so surprising that someone would ask...I said yes, of course. That may have been the time that I thought about doing a flower market garden. I even had books and everything. 

I had a little obsession with Dahlias!

So we continued on spending the summers working the garden growing food and flowers and the winters indoors doing indoor stuff. 

After a few years my life changed in a big way - I was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Dealing with that took away a lot of my desire to grow a garden. We continued with gardening though, but it wasn't as enjoyable as before. Actually, my focus was to get through the surgeries and the treatments that followed. It was all of the energy that I could muster and continue to work through all of the cancer stuff.

During that time the size of the garden grew smaller and my mentality turned to keeping active by cycling. Then after some more time, we were running...and the garden still continued on, but now in boxes that we had built during one of my fall vacation times. 

That seemed to be the turning point and I was starting to get interested in growing food and flowers again. I can't believe how long ago that was! It was September 2008, which would have been four and a half years after my diagnosis. Go HERE for the mini post of those boxes. Since then, the garden started to get bigger again and I started looking at different places to grow things. I have four garden boxes in front of the garage and have been expanding ever since! 

During those years from the first big gardens to what we have now we did a lot of cycling, a little bit of traveling - nothing exotic - then running. My days were spent working Monday thru Friday like everyone else. On Thursdays we would ride the Bicycle Club time trial series and a lot of days I would bike commute to and from work. Saturday was our long ride to somewhere day, anything over 10 miles usually. Running entered the mix a few years ago. These days we still try to get out early in the morning, but snow...and my bad back. Not to mention a lack of motivation. 

Now I'm dreaming again. This blog was created when those dreams of having a hobby farm full time started to fill my mind again. I knew that I needed to start a blog as a journal of sorts to see where we started and how far we are getting along in our dream. 

When this garden season comes around I'll be pulling up the Winter crops and getting the boxes prepped for the Spring veggies. This year I am planning to focus on vegetables that we can grow a lot of to preserve or store.

Waking up to mornings like this helps me to remember that there is a lot of time to plan and to consider what will be happening on our farm. 

I'm so glad that the snow really doesn't stay for long! It sure is pretty to look at though.