The Vintage Garden || My Happy Place

My second modern-to-vintage outfit goes quite well with the theme of today’s youtube video, so I thought I’d share that look while I talk about growing a garden this year! I get quite a few questions about gardening every time I share an instastory while I’m out there. Now, I’m not really a seasoned gardener at all. In fact, this year is only the second year I’ve attempted to garden. The first year I got some carrots and maybe 2 tomatoes, but that was about it. However, I know a few things I could have changed, and I also know that what we did this year vastly helped, so I’ll share those things here!

Beret, Amazon | top, thrifted (similar) | earrings, vintage (similar) | skirt, Amazon | shoes, Modcloth Last year, I set up my garden boxes in front of our old house. The first and foremost thing I know that was an issue with this is that our old house had very little sunlight around it. While the garden boxes caught some afternoon light, at most they were only getting 4-6 hours of sunlight. This alone set it up to fail. Still, my carrots thrived and my spinach grew pretty well. I even got a few sparse peas!

My second mistake in growing a garden last year was my boxes were far too small, and I never thinned any of my plants out! While garden boxes are not necessary at all, they are helpful. They keep pests from getting into your plants as much, and they allow you to fill with whatever dirt you want to use, which can be useful in keeping away weeds. As well, with a little help from some natural repellent, it’s easier to keep things like slugs out of your garden.

This year’s garden, my dad built several large garden boxes, and we did something called Square Foot Gardening. The boxes were filled with Oly Mountain Fish Compost, which is a mix of organic waste, hardwoods, and fish. While getting special dirt isn’t necessary, I know that it vastly helped our plants grow and thrive and produce the incredible amount of produce they’re creating. So if you find that it’s hard to grow plants in your dirt, and you’ve got a little extra money to spare, finding some special garden dirt might be the way to go!

Secondly, mom’s garden is entirely in the sun, with no shade reaching it. The plants love this. I’m very excited for next year, as the home we are buying has wide open spaces that will be ideal for growing things! While I don’t plan to buy special garden dirt, I do hope that I can at least compost a little to help things grow.

Thirdly, after many failed gardens with grocery-store seeds, mom swears by only ever buying from Stokes seeds or other verified and highly recommended seed catalogues. Every seed we planted grew and thrived, to the point that we have so much produce we’re not sure what to do with it, and there’s more to come!

above: back when the peas were just beginning to sprout. above: thinning out the onions above: baby beets, and baby peas

If you’re hoping to plant a garden, the final thing to think about is when to plant what. We literally just follow the instructions on the backs of our seed packets, and have no issues growing what we grow. But not everything can be planted at the same time, so it’s important to read the packets and organize your planting schedule accordingly!

Next year, I won’t be planting a garden in any special dirt. We will be plotting where we want our garden to grow, rototilling up the dirt after we take out the grass, adding some compost (that I can hopefully make myself using a compost box and all our veggie scraps and leaves and such), and just planting away. I already have some seeds that I found from two years ago when we planted things, so I may just use those and see if they come up. If not, no money lost! If so, hooray for free(ish) seeds!

Do you garden? If so, what’s your favorite thing to grow?

Beret, Amazon | top, thrifted (similar) | earrings, vintage (similar) | skirt, Amazon | shoes, Modcloth