Saying Goodbye to our Virginia Garden
We spent three years creating our garden only to realize that we weren’t where we were meant to be. Today we will be saying goodbye to our Virginia Garden.
How did we create our Virginia garden?
When house hunting in Virginia I had three things I wanted: Four bedrooms, a kitchen with an island, and a sunny back yard!
Finding a yard that had enough sun for a garden in Virginia is next to impossible. Am I right east coast folk? The lush green forest that surrounds every neighborhood and fills your yard is absolutely beautiful, but so very shady.
In time we found the place we put an offer on the home. I learned that the place had a Home Owners’ Association (HOA) that would make it impossible to get chickens and goats (something we were hoping to add to our homestead).
I focused on creating a beautiful garden and learned a lot. We chose to do an in-ground garden with wood chips in between the garden rows. The video above goes into detail on how we set up our garden. I hadn’t gardened in somewhere so humid before and learned a lot along the way.
This post teaches you how to set up your own vegetable garden.
Things I grew in our Virginia garden
I absolutely love fresh from the garden salsa. So we always had tomatoes, cilantro, jalapenos, and onions growing.
We always had cucumbers growing as well. I would ferment them into pickles for the kids. There were, of course, carrots in the garden. We would do a round of spring carrots and fall carrots. The rainbow variety of carrots were the kids’ favorites.
We love berries and made sure to have a full row of raspberries and a row of strawberries mixed with blueberry bushes. We grew herbs like basil and dill and root veggies like radishes and beets. Both of which are delicious when fermented.
I love fresh salad greens like lettuce, kale and spinach. I could keep the kale growing here all year long. they are very easy to grow and saved us a lot of money having them available year round!
Our last year we also grew broccoli, brussel sprouts, parsnips, and potatoes for the first time. I never got to see how those turned out as we moved before the harvest dates. I hope the next home owners enjoyed the garden we left behind!
Why did we leave our Virginia garden?
We felt a call to move somewhere that we could grow our homestead even more. We were inspired by Weed em’ and Reap as they homesteaded on one acre of property. We aren’t the kind of people who want 100 acres of land.
We still wanted to live in a neighborhood where our kids would run around and play with other kids. We still wanted space and the freedom to raise whatever animal we wanted though. Finding this combination was a bit difficult but we found an acre plot that checks all the boxes.
We bought land in southern Utah and made preparations to move out there. It was hard to say goodbye to our Virginia garden, but there was so much more in store for our family to come!
Join us on Youtube, Instagram and Facebook as our Nurtured Seed Homestead grows!
