Where to Start

I have been gardening since 2014. Something about being pregnant with my first child brought out a need to care for more stuff. You would think as a new mom, I probably had enough things to worry about, but I felt the opposite. I started very small with a raised garden bed in our back yard. My husband constructed a high bed for me since bending down low was going to add extra strain on my back. One lesson I learned from that raised bed is that I will never do a raised bed like that again. It was raised off the ground with the bottom about two feet off the ground and then It was a 12 inch bed. The bottom was made with chicken wire and enforced by wood beams with a layer of cheesecloth under the dirt. The problem was that we lived in Florida and the moisture level under that bed made it a perfect environment for mosquitos! That first garden became my nemesis because I got eaten alive any time I went out there to tend to it. The lessons I learned from that first garden I keep in my pocket even today! I loved growing potatoes in containers; since then I've only tried potatoes in a bed once and I will never do it again. I find it very difficult to find all of the potatoes when I grow them in a bed, it's so much simpler to just dump my container upside down and gather up my bountiful harvest. I also learned a lot about companion planting although I started small with tomatoes and basil, a perfect pair. One thing I am constantly learning is how to deal with new pests. In this first garden, the trellis you see in the picture above was for cucumbers. We had a lot of beautiful cucumbers growing, and then one day they were eaten up. My guess would be rabbits but who knows, I never found out.