NEW! Journal, Focus and Learner

With all the transition in the past year, one thing that kept coming across my mind my desire to learn how to grow my own vegetables and fruit in a small backyard garden. I had an herb garden at our old house, but was not successful in growing food. The best I did was replant the live lettuce roots I had bought from the store after I took the leaves off. Actually, 3 out of 4 times a new head of lettuce grew and sometimes I even got a third head of lettuce from the original lettuce. I also planted some potatoes that sprouted and was happy to find new ones at harvest time. But one can hardly call that vegetable gardening. I am a beginner.

Now I want to move from beginner to learning how to grow edibles. What better way for me to celebrate the journey and express my enthusiasm, then to start a garden journal? For me, making a journal is a way to keep my enthusiasm fresh for gardening. It seems a little backwards, but for me that’s how it is. I don’t like unfinished journals.

Being a beginner again…

I am a now a beginner gardener, and making an art journal to chronicle the journey. It takes courage and humility to be a begin to learn something new, especially as we age. I also believe the excitement of new learning helps prolong youthfulness and fuels joy. I am much more experienced at art journaling than gardening, so I’m sure I will make garden rookie mistakes along the way and be totally unaware of it, and that means I’ll probably blog about it and have to correct myself after the fact. That’s my disclaimer. I don’t claim to know many horticultural answers, but I have lots of questions, and by the end of the growing season I hope to have more answers so I can do it better next year.

Last year, after selling our previous home, living in the trailer, and then buying this one, I invested in raised beds from Vego Garden during a winter sale, while I was waiting. Patience is not one of my strongest virtues, so this gave me something to dream about. When we first looked at this house on the market, and I saw the back yard, I imagined a raised bed garden design and started researching home-grown edibles and companion planting.

I knew it’s risky to place the garden boxes right outside the dining area doors and living room windows, but that’s where I ‘saw’ it. If the plants don’t produce, it will be very visible, and I will be reminded of it every day. On the other hand, having the garden visible will prompt me to tend to it daily.

As soon as we could, my husband and I filled the boxes with a soil recipe. (I’ll share more about that in a future post.) Then we planted the little apple tree we brought from our previous yard that our daughter had grafted. After loosely planning where to plant what in the raised boxes, we made two trellises.

So far, so good. We’re quite pleased with the arrangement of the raised beds. An added design bonus is that four pots from our old yard fit in nicely in between the metal boxes.

Garden photos

With seeds and seedlings in hand, at the end of April, I sketched out planting possibilities for each raised bed.

This previous anniversary purchase from our former home has found its new home as the centerpiece of the garden.

Gardening is bringing our family together. These beautiful chives were a gift from my daughter and her garden.

In this process there are many unknowns for me and I need to remind myself this is an experiment and I don’t have to do it perfectly. For example, the garden boxes I bought came with self watering trays on the bottom. The only reason I bought these kind was because the size I planned for only came in self-watering raised garden boxes. There are two of the trays per box We live in a wet climate, in western Oregon, and it is especially rainy in the Spring. The question was, should we add the watering trays or not? We paid for them, but is it too wet where we live. After much deliberation, I decided to use them as the base of the raised beds. The exception is where the apple tree would is planted. That tray (there are two self-watering trays per oval box) we put in the center circle raised bed. So we will see if it works or not, but we won’t know until later in the growing season. I’m already finding there are a lot of life lessons related to gardening.

Preparation for starting my garden journal

The pages of my garden journal are smooth watercolor paper and about 8” x 8” size. My plan is to use the same materials I used in The 100 Day Project: pencil, pen and watercolor paints. I was nervous to start in the journal. It’s so pristine and my experience with gardening is so minimal. I wondered how to begin. That’s when I knew that this journal would not only be about the garden in my back yard, but also the garden of my heart. With that in mind, I felt more freedom and more familiar with garden journaling.

In the photo below, it shows some messy sketching of my planter boxes and plant lists on plain copy paper and single boxes on a simple note pad. I also made some simple, temporary labels for seed planting out of wood sticks, chop sticks, glue and an acrylic paint pen.

YouTube videos have been helpful and inspirational. There are a ton of gardening how-to videos out there. One of my favorites is Brian Lowell with Little Homestead Big Dreams (Next Level Homestead. Next Level Gardening. I ordered his book Companion Planting. It is inspiring and easy to follow. So far, it is my most used gardening book. I definitely recommend it for beginning gardeners like myself and I know I will use it as a reference for years to come.

I put my seed packets in a small presentation binder with sleeves I had on hand. So far, it’s been a good way to store and organize the packets and seed tags.

Beginning in my journal

Below are photos of my garden journal so far. The title page is pretty straight forward and the design of the side view of vegetables growing in soil is seen everywhere. Here is my version:

While looking for a garden planning schedule in my texts from my daughter, I came across what her 6-year old daughter said at bedtime. It moved me so much that I’m including it at the beginning of my journal. Then on the other side of the page is my name in leaf shape and a quote from a book I am reading, The Garden Within by Dr. Anita Phillips.

“The Creator planted a garden for us,
and then the Creator planted a garden within us.”

~ Dr. Anita Phillips, from A Garden Within

“When a heart is sad,
it goes down to dust.
But then when it gets love
it grows bigger and bigger.
It’s like when a heart is born,
God makes you out of dirt,
then He plants a heart seed
in you and it grows and grows.
When you have a bigger heart
then you can give more love
to other people and help
their heart grow bigger.”

~ Zenith O’Brien

The garden plan

After quite a bit of sketching on plain paper, I drew the garden raised bed plan in pencil in my journal pretty much to scale. I made a symbol key instead of filling the garden box shapes with words. I ended up changing and correcting a number of things, so it is not without mistakes, but I find myself referring to the right page quite a lot.

Garden plan page details

Garden pocket page

As you can see above the encircled vegetable illustration is a pocket for packets, garden notes or anything else I want to put in it. A page got torn out of my journal, so I tried to repurpose it. That’s what prompted the pocket idea. The circle shape felt right to me, connecting to the center circle of the garden beds design on the opposite page. The pattern behind the pocket is a piece of marbled deli paper glued onto the page before I attached the top pocket page with double-sided tape. The vegetables were drawn with a mechanical pencil and then painted using watercolors.

It’s kind of amazing how an unplanned torn out page can inspire an artful pocket.

“I’m still amazed
when a seed
grows into a plant.”

I appreciate you stopping by and hope you are inspired.

Nurture what brings you joy!

Valerie