Starting a garden....or not?

Do you send vegetables from your garden to your neighbor?  I do. I also send them eggs. My neighbor loves the homegrown farm food experience. She has even taken an interest in our homegrown chicken meat. Asking if I would sell her some. Even though I think it is perfectly fine, the government not so much. There are a lot of regulations against selling meat raised in your backyard that has also be processed there.  We unfortunately do not have the setup necessary to pass an inspection and i do not plan on getting it for the moment.



 But with the interest there, I am curious what others would do if they had a neighbor that wanted a garden and chicken meat and had the land to do so, but would not work hard to do what needed to be done to upkeep a garden or feed their livestock. Is it a lost cause trying to help that type of person? The city slickers who love the farm stuff but get "sick" every time they go outside. Would you give them chicks to raise? Would you till them a garden?

I would love to help these people but unfortunately I do not believe they are ready for their own adventure in farming. Because of this I am going to invite the neighbor to help in my garden in exchange for veggies. This will help her gauge how ready for gardening she is. I think as people we tend to jump head first into things and wait for consequences later, when it comes to a garden the work can quickly overwhelm someone who is not used to the bending, kneeling and being in the
heat. Even me a person who loves to garden, can sometimes forget how long i have been in the sun, and get a good sunburn or a sore back from kneeling or hoeing rows.

Instead of jumping into a huge garden, i think the best starting point for most people is a raised bed garden. This can be as small as a five gallon bucket with a tomato plant or a plastic swimming pool with a variety of plants or even a permanent bed built from whatever material you see fit. One plastic swimming pool can actually fit quite a bit of plants, you can fit a few tomato plants a pepper plant and a squash plant in one easily. As long as you fill your garden bed with good soil and drill some holes in the bottom it is hard to go wrong. I like to purchase bags of compost and manure mix. The bags run 1.99 at our local tractor supply. Just because a bag of dirt is expensive does not necessarily mean that it is good. They also sell bags of "topsoil", but from what i found it is mostly clay
soil in most of the bags that i have purchased. For the same price i prefer the more nutrient dense choice.

With a raised bed garden you also do not need a lot of the tools that you need for a larger garden. For my large garden i use everything from a double action hoe to a digging fork. For my raised bed i really need nothing more than a shovel and hoe and that is really not  necessary. Hands are really the best and only tool you need to tend your garden. A deep longing for fresh vegetables doesn't hurt either.

So if you have been thinking about gardening but don't know if you are quite ready, whether it be an issue of time or duty, you can always start small and then go big later. Getting started and learning are the important parts. You carry knowledge with you all the time and it weighs nothing. We all learn more quickly by doing, so get out do, get your hands dirty. Grow something, anything. The only way to fail is by not doing anything. Happy HOMEsteading.