Recap of my first year…

My First Year Gardening: Zone 8b

Gardens come in all shapes and sizes. It can be containers, garden beds, directly in the ground, or some variation of all the above. Over the last 20 years, I have been gardening at every duty station. Each year I have varying levels of success. In November 2023, we moved to a small farm outside of Dallas. I wanted to start gardening as soon as possible, so I purchased 5 raised Birdie beds from Epic Gardening and had 8 cubic feet of soil tucked in.  And so began my series of mistakes that I will amend for the following year!

Mistake 1

I purchased premixed gardening soil from a local company. I had been reading the reviews. It was hit or miss on the quality of the soil. Many people complained of plastic and other non-compost debris in their mix. Many also complained that the soil was hydrophobic, while others complained that the soil was just not very nutrient-dense. So the mistake I made was trusting that the soil was nutrient-dense and not adding fertilizer.  Halfway through the season, I found a local gardening shop that got me hooked on Microlife 6-2-4 fertilizer. I had tried everything else, fish emulsifier, Pennington fertilizer for fruits and veggies, and even some bone meal fertilizers. Nothing was working. I worked in the Microlife and my gardens took off. So clearly this was what my soil was missing. The numbers 6-2-4 on the bag refer to the amount of Nitrogen, Soluble Phosphorus, and Potash available in the fertilizer. My soil is nitrogen deficient. It’s the reason I saw yellowing stalks and leaves, poor plant development, and a lack of fruiting.  The nitrogen helped the plants grow but I needed something that lingered longer in the soil.

Mistake 2:
Planting time is unique everywhere you live. We are living in zone 8b, the new designation by the USDA. This is my first time gardening in zone 8b but I had lived in zone 9 for two years. In those two years, I struggled to get any production which I attributed to too much shade and heat. However, I think I figured out my second mistake. I made a quick visit to the local garden shop here in North Texas and they gave me a seed planting guide. And a quick look at the planting guide, after I laminated it of course, showed me that I was using a zone 6/7 planting strategy and not a zone 8+ strategy.

Zone 8b has 3 planting seasons. Early Spring, Early Fall, and Winter. Some things grow well in all 3 of these seasons because our temperatures do not stay below freezing. Timing is everything when it comes to living in certain zones!

Mistake 3:
Seed purchase. Have you ever gotten suckered in by pretty magazines? This past year, I sure did. I have been growing vegetables and herbs since 2005, mostly in container gardens and some in raised beds. Each time I had purchased seeds from the local store, buying whatever Lowes, Home Depot, or the grocery store sold. My goal has always been to have a food forest. Previous gardens have always produced an abundance of food. But now that I’m working on regenerating my land, and looking for bigger production I purchased organic heirloom seeds because I found a great magazine that had amazing photos. What did I get this year? A litany of stringy starts that refused to grow past a certain point. And not for lack of trying. I threw them out, adjusted my grow lights, and began several times in fact. Seeds germinated so that wasn’t a factor, but they just fizzled out. The seeds that were directly sowed didn’t germinate at all. It has been a frustrating year. I had a 95% failure rate with a single company. Did i have any success? Of course! I bought seeds from many places so I was able to track what grew and what didn’t. Oddly enough when I started talking to people about my seed issue, the same name popped up over and over as problematic. So I will say this. Don’t get suckered into pretty magazines. Find farmers who have good production rates with specific seeds and buy from them. Companies to consider, MI Gardner, Epic Gardens, and True Leaf. 

Conclusion:

Most of the time you don’t know the mistakes you will make until you make them! So hopefully my mistakes help you make more educated decisions about what you want to do for your garden!