Welcome to my backyard gardening project. Or at least a journal of all the trials, errors, successes, and failures associated with said project. I hope anyone who stumbles across this page will find the accounts of my experiences educational or at least entertaining. If nothing else, this site will be a good reference for me to look back on in years to come.
Background
In the interest of being honest from the start, I’ll admit that I’m far from an expert on agriculture. I hold no relevant degrees, I’ve never taken a master gardener class, and I mostly butcher the Latin names of most plants. At the end of the day, I’m just your average middle-aged dad who loves to grow food for his family.
That said, I did convert a small semi-urban backyard into a system of raised bed gardens that yielded hundreds of pounds of fresh veggies last year. To me, that’s kind of exciting and being in my 40’s, I don’t get excited easily.
Admittedly, the first few seasons were a bit rough. During the first 2 to 3 seasons I failed to employ appropriate countermeasures against a veggie garden’s single greatest foe in California’s Sacramento Valley: Long, extremely hot, extremely dry summers.
Challenges of Gardening in the Sacramento Valley (USDA Zone 9b)
Our summers are nothing short of brutal. For someone like me who lived the first thirty-some-odd years of his life in Northern New England, they’re nothing short of hellish. For example, in 2022, the Sacramento area endured a total of 42 days of temps that were 100 degrees or greater. We had a particularly fun 9 day stretch in September where every day was over 100, most days were over 105, and two of those days hit 114. Making matters worse, we received no appreciable rainfall from April to November.
I quickly found that sticking to gardening methods practical in more moderate climates meant a Sacramento garden would shrivel up and possibly burst into flames before the end of June.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that our winters, while not deep freezes experienced in the Vermont of my youth, are still pretty damn chilly. Warm-ish winter days with frosty nights are very common here. This can make cool weather loving but frost intolerant crops like potatoes very hard to grow. If you don’t thread the needle perfectly in terms of timing, potato plants will be killed off by frost or stunted by extreme heat before they can produce reasonably large tubers. We harvest a lot of tiny boiler potatoes.
In spite of the challenges, through an ongoing cycle of failure, research, and modification of methods, I have been able to work around some of the climatic challenges inherent to region resulting in our garden really starting to take off in recent years. In particular, effective mulching, the installation of shade cloth, and the selection of heat tolerant varieties have been gardening game changers. I will, of course, be outlining these methods in greater detail in future articles.
Goals moving forward
My overarching goal is to shift our gardens from the realm of backyard hobby to something more akin to a micro-farm, for lack of a better term.
Presently, I have 400 square feet of growable space. I want to continue to develop methods to maximize yields from this relatively small area and determine exactly how much food it can produce over the course of a year. What percentage of my family’s overall caloric needs can I produce in my postage stamp back yard?
To determine this, I will be quantifying my harvest over the next few years; weighing each tomato and every stray green bean and crunching the numbers to estimate the total caloric yield. Expect a fair number of charts and spreadsheets.
Additionally, I want to explore gardening methods that conserve as much water as possible. While the tremendously rainy fall/winter of 2022/2023 has bumped most of the state out of the most extreme levels of drought, this reprieve is likely temporary. With this in mind, I will continue to explore water conservation methods to ensure my gardens consume significantly less water than the average lawn.
Finally, I want to do all of this for as cheaply as is reasonably possible. While there are a lot of psychological and culinary benefits to growing your own vegetables, my practical side needs a a reasonable ROI. I love a fresh heirloom tomato, but I’d prefer if that tomato doesn’t ultimately cost me $50 after all materials, time, and effort are accounted for.
Let’s Grow!
At the time of this post’s publication it’s early May, 2023. The weather has been amazing, our plant starts are in the garden, and almost everything is off to great start. I hope you’ll check in now and again to see how it all progresses.