The Life Impacts of Growing Food with a Family
As Rachael and I became more and more successful at hunting to provide our own protein for our family, our mindsets started to shift from solely providing meat to, “what else can we provide?” We were never raised to provide any of our own resources, so this was a new adventure for us. We believed that gardening was was not in our wheelhouse, or that it was for people who were way more experienced and the knowledge would be way too hard to obtain. But, as time went on the itch to grow our self sustainable lifestyle became stronger, until we finally took action.
We knew gardening was a major resource for our family to thrive but also to expand us as individuals. Gardening would be another skill for our family to learn together and ultimately, for our kids to pass down to their families.
We never start small! Rachael always tells me that the only pace I have is fast. This is true and not always the best, but that’s why we make a good team because we balance each other out. When we decided to start gardening it was a hot topic in our household. For a month or so everything we read, listened to, or watched was about becoming a gardener. We learned about soil and plants, we learned about raised beds and in-ground gardening. The different zones for gardening stretched across the world. We tried to take it all in, which for the most part, we did.
For our first year, we decided to buy starter plants. We found a really cool garden center in Colorado Springs named Phelan Gardens (I still really miss that place). I remember walking in for the first time and the feeling of so much joy and excitement just overwhelmed my body. The euphoric rush of learning something new and actually going out of our comfort zones and doing it was amazing. I immediately knew I was going to get carried away but my feelings told me that didn’t matter. All four of us, (Rachael, Nolan, Kinley, Leighton), began grabbing anything and everything we wanted to grow. Our budget was gone. The excitement had won. But, I told myself it was an investment into a new lifestyle, so it didn’t matter to me. We bought so many different plants from tomatoes to peppers, all types of squash, zucchinis, and pumpkins. We bought anything that looked cool and anything that we thought was exciting. I’ll never forget how fun that was, and I’ll never forget how expensive it was. But at the end of the day it truly didn’t matter to us because that is what was important.
Mistake number 1!
I’m going to keep this blog post fairly short for the first gardening post, but I do have to share something that is quite funny now. We bought all of our first starter plants, for our first year of gardening, in the middle of May. We had a drop of about 1,800 vertical feet of elevation from where our house was to the store location. We lived, at the time, in the heart of the Black Forest, at one of the high points. We never took into consideration the difference in temperature as you go up in elevation…. Well, we got home and let the plants acclimate and began planting the next weekend. Our garden looked so beautiful with all these brand new plants. My ego was ecstatic, I remember showing my friends our garden with a rockstar grin. I was now a professional gardener, and my kids were impressed too.
Well I let my emotion overcome my logic and put those plants in the ground way too soon, my excitement was more important than science. The cold temperatures at night began to kill almost every plant we bought; about 90% of what we bought died, and so did my ego. My wallet didn’t feel too good either. This mistake was one of the best mistakes we made. It showed us we need to pay more attention, it also created a fire inside us to be more successful.
The lessons we learned were very impactful. We were definitely not going to buy all brand new starter plants again, so we had to quickly learn how to sow our seeds indoors. Now, to this day, we harvest seeds from our garden plants for the next year. Our kids spend their earned chore money on plants they want to grow. Gardening has had such a meaningful impact on our family. I cannot thank mistake number 1 enough!!