Hello fellow gardeners,

This month I’ve decided to feature one of our second year gardeners to tell his story and share some pictures from his garden. Justin’s story is below.

Justin Delp’s Story:

“We are so excited for the garden this year. Last year was our first year and we loved learning so many new things! For our second year, we’re excited to try new things with it. New this year, we expanded our garden by two rows to add fruits and flowers.

The second big change we made is putting landscape fabric down. Last year, we had a ton of weeds. We put cardboard down in the walkways that helped, but we were still out there pulling weeds all the time. We’re really hoping the landscape fabric will better help to prevent weeds this time year. It’s been a real learning experience. We had to figure out stuff like reworking our irrigation system and burning the holes in the cloth for the plants to grow, but we’re really excited about it!

Another major thing we learned from last year is spacing. We had so much stuff growing on top of each other last year and this year. So being more deliberate in planting space is a must this year! We know now that tomatoes get crazy very quickly, so we are going to be diligent in trellising them and we are going to keep them more spread out from other things.

We love this group and had such a great time last year learning all about gardening. My wife and I love being able to cook with food that we’ve grown ourselves and being able to share it with others. This year, we have a baby girl to help us out in the garden (or crawl around while we work in the garden), so we’re looking forward to having her along for the process! It will also be great to be able to purée some of the fruit and veggies we’re growing this year to have her try them. We’re excited to see what this year brings!”

A picture of Justin’s garden expansion.