Bountiful Garden
Posted on by Nancy Kula

Big Yield and No Weeding Gardening

Between the years of Covid and expanding inflation, you may be considering gardening. Thoughts of having to tend plants coupled with additional thoughts of backbreaking weeding and constant watering may have caused you to stop your gardening considerations.

Well, I have exciting news for you! We have a productive garden and we NEVER pull weeds or water much.

Garden in July
This is a photo of our garden less than one month after we planted it in the middle of June. GIANT plants!

Our Garden is a Big Producer!

After eating like vegetarians for July-October, and processing lots of vegetables for our own use for later, we also donate hundreds of vegetables to neighbors and local food banks. Did I mention we never pull weeds?

Let’s take a look at our garden right now.

Garden in Early Spring

Right now it looks pretty ratty doesn’t it? What you are looking at is a bunch of sloppy dead stuff. In the late summer there was at least 12 inches of mulch piled up between rows of waist-high produce. Now it’s a gooey mess of not yet activated growing power.

Dirt is Dead Stuff

That’s kind of icky to think about it, but yes, dirt is dead stuff. The more organic (dead stuff) you have, the better. There are some gardeners who have a compost bin or heap. We practice composting too, but we just throw all our organic left overs on the garden throughout the year. No need to buy any fancy equipment.

How to Create Organic Matter Easily

We collect every organic element in our house to throw on the garden. We do this year round. I don’t use our garbage disposal. Ever. Putting drain-clogging stuff down my pipes is just not appealing to me. I instead throw that growing vegetable gold on the garden.

Vegetables in Compost Bucket
You can see I made Banana Bars! A good way to use up old bananas! All of this will be thrown on our garden later today.

I’ve seen fancy composting equipment and fancy composting containers for the countertop. You can do that. But it’s pretty simple to just keep a small paint bucket you can buy at any hardware store to hold your vegetable peelings, eggshells, and banana peels. Plan on dumping the bucket often on your garden. We dump ours almost daily.

Compost Bucket on Kitchen Counter
This is a bucket purchased at a local hardware store. A plate is on top to keep smells down. This is emptied almost daily.

Look closely at our not-growing-anything-yet garden. It looks forlorn. In a few months we will have it tilled, and all of that dead looking matter will be mixed with the earth to create a growing material that is world class!

A view of a fallow garden in March
The garden at this point is super gooey. We’ve had a lot of cold rain and it made all of the seven month old grass clippings mushy. You can see compost bucket stuff laying on the top. Wait until July…Green Explosion!

We Put Our Garden in Later Than Most

We don’t put in our garden until after we put in our really big garden (the farm). This isn’t usually until after June 1. This is easily a month later than our neighbors, but trust me, there’s enough time to grow a gigantic crop!

Last year, due to life circumstances, we didn’t put our garden in until June 16th. That was a very late start! This “Later Than Everybody’s Garden” grew hundreds of cucumbers and squash from 6 plants each. Even after giving away piles, we got to the point that we would say, “Do we have to eat cucumbers and squash AGAIN today?”

I will show you how to replicate our success with detailed information about our gardening process throughout the spring and summer.

Be Blessed!