Creating the Garden Pt. 2: Expectations and Reality

I am at a weird crossroads in my life. On the one hand, I feel like I have years of experience and wisdom that I can use to conquer any task ahead of me, and on the other, I am only 25 and still learning much about life… and flowers. I can remember the exact moment when I looked at Linnea and said, “Wow, we have grown a lot, and man do we keep getting better at this” (as you can tell, I was feeling very confident). Clearly the garden thought I needed a reality check because soon after we had four big things that ended up much differently than what we had expected.

The first issue that became apparent really quickly was our walkways. When we planned out our garden we went back and forth on how we wanted to lay these out. We eventually agreed that planting clover paths would be a great way to stay natural as well as save some money since we would not need to buy as much weed barrier to cover things. I bought about an acre's worth of clover for our paths, which only really needed about 300 sqft of coverage. I was so excited when I got the package that I immediately opened the clover and proceeded to pour the full acres worth of seed in the lanes, as long as some sprouted we would be good, right? Turns out, not only is it a silly idea to use all of the clover at once, but I spread out the clover on the hottest week of the year, which doesn’t make for the best germination conditions. Since the ground was bare, and the sun was beating down at around 101 degrees, not a single lane had the lush, amazing clover walk we imagined. Instead, we ended up getting tons of weeds growing in the lanes, which we had to cut down every week. It started to feel like a jungle. We agreed, the lanes needed to be covered, or we would go crazy. So, we bought more tarping to cover the weed jungle we called our walking lanes. During the fiasco, we encountered another problem, the corn fields. Our garden has fields on 3 of the 4 sides bordering it, which means there isn’t much to prevent the wind from picking up speed before it gets to our flowers. All that wind meant that our flowers looked like they were attempting to break the Limbo world record. They needed to stay upright somehow.

After Fall cleanup, the only thing that remained were the "walkways".

We needed to start getting netting up quickly, so we went to our local hardware store to look at garden stake options. That's when we started doing math, we had 6 rows that needed netting, each post needed to be 4 feet apart so 8 on each side. So we needed 96 posts, but we rounded up to 100 because it’s always good to have a few extra. We turned the corner to the staking section and, $4.50 PER!?! I had to do a double-take, we would need to spend 450 dollars for stakes just to hold up our flowers. I started to think to myself, why spend that money when I could figure out a cheaper solution, we just need solid stick-like objects to hold up a net… I have a ton of ½ inch PVC leftover from a previous project, it's pretty much the same thing. When we got home, I went to work; I was about to save up money, and I was ready for the challenge. Unfortunately, like all things, if you don’t think through the small details, those small details are going to be the things that get you in the end. We drilled 3 holes along the length of the PVC pipes as a method to attach the netting. Using three holes allowed us to add the netting, and two sets of twine around the perimeter of the rows. I proceeded to hammer the PVC into the ground, then it was time to put the netting over them to allow the flowers to grow through in a straighter manner. I say straighter because our method still allowed for the PVC to tilt and shift, so the netting wasn’t as straight as we would have liked. Soon after that, we found out that not all garden issues are structural.

Look at those posts lean! So dramatic.

You have to be okay with bugs if you want to garden. And you really learn just how many kinds of bugs there are when you get some flowers going. While we were more than happy to see bees, butterflies, and ladybugs in our garden, what we found was that a few varieties of flowers we were growing attracted some unwelcome guests. Guests who loved the open buffet of flowers we had lined up for them. Especially our dahlias. From the very beginning, Linnea informed me that bugs may be a problem for our dahlias and that we should protect them with an organza bag so they don't get eaten up. I thought that was overkill. There were no bags in any of the dahlia field photos I had seen, so why do we need any? Well, past Cameron, it’s because we were not using any pesticides or insecticides. We wanted our garden to be as safe and chemical-free as possible. However, we did start using Neem oil (an organic pesticide) about halfway through our growing season, but that first few months without it had already allowed for many bugs to lay nests or eggs within our plants. However, we could still help our dahlias, so we went ahead and ordered the organza bags to help protect them, and wow did that help. The ones that got bags before they bloomed had hardly any nibbles or small brown spots, just a natural bright bloom. The others not so much, but now we know!

Somebody ate right through this poor dahlia :(

Speaking of bright blooms, turns out that flowers themselves can be a problem. When we did our research on what flowers to grow, one that popped up many times was calendula. It is easy to direct seed and blooms quickly, but one thing we failed to understand was that calendulas are not single-stem plants. Have you heard of the mythical creature Hydra? The idea is that when you cut off its head two more take its place. That's how it felt with our calendula, sometimes we would cut hundreds of those suckers a day. Also, if you don’t know, calendula plants are covered in a sticky substance. This makes a wonderful gnat trap, but a not-so-fun harvesting experience. Soon, what had started as the first flower to bloom in our garden and brought so much joy and excitement quickly turned into an enemy. Linnea thoroughly enjoyed clearing those out and refuses to plant another seed for the foreseeable future, and I can’t say that I blame her either.

Too many Calendula

The right amount of Calendula

Through all of that craziness, it was important to remember not to put too much pressure on ourselves, even if it was hard. It ended up being that the biggest takeaway I got from our first year of flower farming was that it is all a learning process - something that Linnea keeps reminding me of. Not one of those moments was a huge mistake; no one got hurt, we didn’t lose hope in our flowers, and we didn’t burn down the garden. We learned from our missteps, and I know we will make countless more. We are new to the game of flower farming, and I know through the years we will keep learning as we grow alongside our flowers, turning our expectations into reality.