The benefits of slowly building your systems

General Discussions
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My first year of gardening, I was super excited to do everything! I wanted to grow all the vegetables, all the fruits, experiment with everything I had been reading about for years while we were waiting to finally, finally, finally have land . . .

My husband is more sensible than I am, and he told me, “No trees this year. Start slow. Only one new major thing in the garden per year.”

I was sulky about that, because I was dying to get started with everything at once, but . . . he was totally right. Everything has turned out much better for my having followed his advice to move slowly and add one new major layer of complication at a time.

For me, this has turned out to be, so far:

Year #1: First attempt at annuals.
Year #2: First attempt at perennials, including fruit trees.
Year #3: First attempt at a greenhouse, and first attempt at collecting rainwater.
Year #4: First attempt at edible mushrooms, and shifting to watering only with stored rainwater.
Year #5: First attempt at a front yard garden, and shifting to massively upgrading the greenhouse.

Approximate plans for the future:
Year #6: First attempt at turning my back yard into an edible meadow?
Year #7: First attempt at livestock, probably quail?
Year #8: First attempt at livestock kept for meat, possibly rabbits?

For those of you who have been gardening for awhile, what has the arc of your adding new things been?

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Your dynamic sounds similar to ours lol I was ready to till up the whole yard to make a garden/orchard but husband wasn’t on board and fair enough it would have been way too much to manage. I’ve been gardening for ever in some capacity but last summer was our first year at our new property. We had a smaller homestead property before.

  1. Set up prior to first summer (we arrived the prior fall) planted some trees around the perimeter, tilled the garden spot and put up fence, built a greenhouse. Situated our existing chickens.
  2. Summer #1 used the greenhouse for the first time, kept the garden. Gave minimal care to the trees.
  3. This summer I will have to help my chickens raise chicks and I want to raise pigs for meat. So no perennial expansion this year and I might reduce the garden to just the greenhouse. But I met some neighbours with an amazing orchard and they said we could pick berries there. Perfect since I have toddlers!

You can’t do everything all the time. I have unlimited plans for gardens and orchards and livestock but I know things will get away from me if I try to do too much at once.

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Hee hee! Yes! I’ve learned the same thing. “Biting off way more than I can chew” is very easy for me. My husband is a wise man who knows me well! :laughing: It sounds like yours is, too!

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My path is one of tiny advancemente in a sea of failures.
I built a growing table out of pallet wood for my terrace. Here I grew very little since it is full sun and full wind exposed, and I’ve been learning what can grow and what not. Still, it is quite small. To make things even harder, I try to grow everything with my own compost, and very little extra fertilizer, which happens to be very difficult when growing in pots.
Then I was allowed to participate in a community garden, but since there wasn’t irrigation anymore, it was a trial after another. First year we had a lot of horse manure, so something grew during the rainy season, nothing after that. Next year we switched to fully ecological. We bought a few draught resistant saplings, but they needed some care for the first year that we couldn’t give. Third year we asked for help and installed a rainwater collection system, which is working half-speed because the tanks broke and we haven’t got resources for repairing them. Anyways, it is providing a little vital water when we need it most, and finally we could keep a few fruit trees surviving the summer.
In the second year I experimented different garden beds, and finally in the fourth year I landed into a system that seems to work better. Still not enough for growing continental vegetables full year, but it extends my growing season a month or two.
I am not totally opposed to irrigate, but it takes energy and resources that we don’t have, so I ask my friends to keep it small, irrigating only the most dear crops.

This is the fifth year and now the soil starts to look better, the mulch is showing results, the wind barriers are helping, the water collection landscaping is giving some fruits too (terraces and ditches for slowing the runoff water). Still, my productivity is small, nitrogen seems to be deficient, maybe the mulch is taking some nitrogen away. But while the plants aren’t growing fast, the soil is improving, so eventually it will be there. I hope.
I am being more generous throwing seeds too, and I’m seeing different results: areas with enough plants helping themselves, instead of a few ill plants fighting against weeds.

I may not be getting any noticeable food for my home, but in terms of learning I have plenty.

You are right, the building is slow, but every little success adds to the other, and when they pile up they almost ressemble a full success.

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Same for me. Twentyfive years ago, I knew how to garden and had a wonderful, healthy, vegetable garden. Then we moved onto this lot with very aggressive tall grasses. And at some point a previous owner grew annual morning glories. My first few years attempting a vegetable garden were abysmal but beautiful failures. Anywhere the ground was broken, morning glories grew. They overtook everything, and I did not have the time or other resources to keep them in check. I gave up for a few years, then tried in another location. I grew some tomatoes. But massive weeds and the grass smother everything. Life was overwhelming at the time, so gardening took a back seat and I did not even try for several years. But now things have settled down and I am moving forward once again. I have planted so many trees, just to have the grass smother them, that I have also learned that there is no point in planting so much that I won’t have time to keep it properly mulched against the grass. So, I finally had an apple tree survive and grow large enough to produce fruit. Just to have it infected with cedar rust. I want to plant all the trees so much, but this year I am forcing myself to focus on the annual garden, and put the trees and shrubs on maintenance. See if what I already have will live, and perhaps plant more wisely in the future. But then I also just ordered 50 shrubs. Chokecherry and Juneberry. Do I have a good place to plant them? No. (Sigh) I am spending this winter mulching the spots where I hope to plant squash and corn and watermelon, getting the tomato and pepper patch mulched, and hopefully plant root crops there also, and getting my surviving fruit trees mulched well. Last year I harvested a couple ears of corn from a grassy patch, and I will hopefully get those seeds planted where they will have to compete to survive again. And chickens. They will have to have a secure run, while I will also allow them to free range during the day. I want to plant sunflowers in their run. Also, Nanking Cherry. All the permaculture sites seem to love it, but mine don’t fruit. I think I will move them into the chicken run. It would be a nice shrub for them. So, yes. My system builds slowly, in spite of me.

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If you have the time to try it, you might cover all of those weed-grass-infested places with several layers of cardboard (and a foot of wood chips on top, too, if you can manage it). Cover it, and leave it, do absolutely nothing with it, for at least a year. Then start planting fruit trees and bushes into it. That’s how I xeriscaped my front yard, and it seems to have killed off all my annoying native grasses completely.

It didn’t work for the stars of Bethlehem. They all managed to grow through the mulch. So now I have the time-consuming process of watching for those leaves to poke up through the mulch in winter, then getting a shovel and digging deep to finally pull those things up. Still, they’re dormant in the summer, so they aren’t taking any water when the water is scarce, and they aren’t allelopathic and behave very well in a polyculture, so they aren’t really a problem unless you’re a perfectionist who wants to only have edible spring bulbs flowering everywhere. (Laugh.)

Right now, I’m doing the same thing with my back yard, which has a problem with both vigorous perennial grasses and bindweed. The grasses are dying. The bindweed is finding every possible gap and growing through it. So I keep pulling the bindweed out, over and over again, and then laying down yet another layer of cardboard whenever I get more boxes to remove all the tape from and lay down.

Because it’s not working nearly as well for the bindweed as it does for the grasses, I’m not sure if a similar approach would help with your morning glories. I will say that it does seem to decrease my bindweed’s initial vigor by about 80% to have to grow up through all that mulch, though, so that’s something.

Unfortunately, for me, the most important thing for long-term fruit tree survival seems to be to dig a very deep hole (at least two feet, preferably three) and remove lots of rocks and replace them with logs and branches. Our soil drains way too quickly; hugelkultur really seems to be a necessity. Swales are also very helpful. Both of those things take a lot of my time to set up. But . . . all the labor is in the setup, because once it’s finished, all I need to do from then on is add more mulch on top once a year. So I highly recommend it, but with the caveat that it’s front-loading a lot of labor. My personal thought is that doing a lot of really difficult one-time labor now, in my forties, in order to make sure I won’t have to ever do it again, is something I will probably greatly appreciate when I’m in my sixties.

Chokecherries are very strong trees. They grow wild in my ecosystem, albeit only up on the mountains and near rivers (both places with more water than the rest of the ecosystem). I hope they will do well for you. :crossed_fingers:

Which juneberry species did you order? I really want to try Amelanchier alnifolia because the fruits are supposed to be the tastiest, but I am also probably going to plant Amelanchier utahensis because it’s native to my ecosystem, and therefore very promising for being able to thrive on neglect.

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This is so good to hear! I know that slow is the right way to go. In reading, gardening, relationship building. I’m working to move slowly in a variety of ways, noting things that we might do in a few years. I also working to not plan too far ahead! 3 feet of red clay to grade the yard around the new house didn’t discourage the green briar at all, and green briar laughs at layers of cardboard and mulch. So, it’s the long game with green briar, cutting it down regularly.

But I’m making notes on this as I make plans!

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@UnicornEmily I have done the cardboard covered with mulch, that is how I carved out my watermelon patch last year. I don’t have access to woodchips, but I do have access to hay bales, and that is what I use. I am glad you are getting your land tamed while you are young, I am already halfway through my 60s, and am impatient. (haha) The grass is relentless, and I have a large space, maybe 3/4 of an acre. It has to be reclaimed every year, it seems, as I cannot possibly do the whole thing. But that is my dream, if I can get some plots, kind of like islands, fully claimed, and border them with a rhizome barrier like comfrey, eventually before I die, I can have the whole thing landscaped.

Chokecherries grow wild here in the fence lines where the birds plant them. I would just put mine in my fence line also, except I have already planted most of that space with other shrubs. I might watch in the spring, and if there are gaps from previous plantings, that might be the place for chokecherries. I do not know what juneberry species I am getting. The NRD sells them very cheaply (approx. $1 each) in packs of 25, for the farmers and ranchers to plant in windbreaks mostly, for the wildlife. So, they are most likely just the species, not anything special. In previous years, I have planted Siberian pea shrub, two kinds of lilac, sand cherry, and false indigo. Manchurian apricot, one survivor. Black cherry. They are thriving. And golden currents. The currents didn’t do well, but so far, the others all have survivors. I might have one or two currents hanging on. But, yes, I am spending my free time this winter hauling hay by the pitchfork-full all around my yard.

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Oh, wow, greenbriar sounds like an exceptionally annoying weed! I’d probably prefer it over poison ivy . . . but not by much! :laughing:

In fact, you have successfully convinced me that my most obnoxious perennial weed (bindweed) is no big deal and actually kind of friendly. :wink: It’s good to be reminded to count my blessings! :winking_face_with_tongue:

I once lived in a townhouse with a massive shared lawn that had tons and tons of burr grass in it. The HOA mowed once a week and didn’t do anything about the burr grass, so every time they mowed, they spread the seeds worse. :man_facepalming: Finally, I decided that I could either complain about it or I could go get to work, and I started spending about an hour a day going outside pulling out burr grass by hand. It was way too widespread for one person to solve it, but I hope I at least stemmed the tide a little, and made the lawn better for the small children and pets that often went running around on that grass.

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You’ve got exactly the right idea! “Islands of fertility.” It’s a concept I learned from . . . I think it was a permaculture video. The idea is that, if you create optimal small areas and gradually spread them wider, you can eventually have them spread to fill the whole space.

A rhizome barrier like comfrey sounds like a very interesting idea. You might also try planting a thick area with some kind of bulbing perennial that spreads rapidly, because I’ve heard those clumps of bulbs can become so tightly squeezed that grass rhizomes can’t get through them. And I’ve seen it happen with both stars of Bethlehem and grape hyacinths. Maybe garlic that you plant once and then proceed to ignore for the next few years could be used in a similar way? It might be a neat way to get some food out of your grass barrier!

By the way, I’ve also noticed — and this is very intriguing indeed — that bindweed never seems to grow in the same places where stars of Bethlehem are thriving. Even though my back yard has loads of both, it never seems to have both in the same area. Maybe those thick clumps of bulbs block bindweed from being able to spread its roots around everywhere, or something?

Yes, if you’re in your sixties, I perfectly understand why it’s hard to be patient! (Laugh.) I’d feel the same way. Even in my mid-forties, I keep on thinking, “If we’d only been able to buy this house twenty years earlier, the things I could’ve done with the garden already by now . . .! ” But I keep on reminding myself that we plan to be here for the rest of our lives, so there’s time.

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Once we had a yard we owned I started with fruit trees, berries, perennial walking onions, herbs, native edible perennials, first in the back yard, but not too many new plants each year, chaotic food forest david the good style. I dug holes in the “lawn” (mixed meadow with so much annoying bermuda grass) and then put down cardboard and free wood chips to suppress the grass in islands around the perennials. Yearly I do annual veggies and melons between the young food forest plants and adjacent to them, but the best method has been mounded right on top of the bermuda: cardboard, pile of soil, woodchips around the base and over all the soil mound once the seeds sprout. Currently slowly, very slooooooowly, converting the front yard to ancient apples (mostly pre 1800 for my allergy trials). It will be another chaotic food forest style but hopefully with less bermuda than my back yard food forest. Right now all the apple trees are in giant grow bags. Some are seedlings I bought, some I grafted myself. I have nursery underlayment in a giant roll waiting for me to rent a mini excavator with a one foot bucket to dig a moat around the two front sections of my yard so I can suppress the bermuda and bury the edge of the nursery cloth and then bury clear plastic in the hottest months this summer. I injured myself last spring and summer so my overly ambitious front yard plans got pushed forward a year. I also have a bunch of native food crop tree seeds stratifying and I have tree pots to start them (persimmons, pawpaw, american plum, etc.). So eventually I’ll need more land or I’ll start planting them at friends’ houses and in median strips and the edges of empty lots, community gardens, and school gardens. I love experimenting but I do get disappointed with abject failures. I’m working on being more open to failed experiments. I love trying to propagate things, so that’s been super fun: getting native passionfruit maypop to germinate from seed to increase fruit yield in my patch in my garden, grafting ancient apples from little sticks, trying to understand a quite actively growing but not truly fruiting muscadine that was already here (does it need the opposite color muscadine in perfectly flowered or is it a wild one with tiny fruit every few years? still unclear to me.). Also my biggest hurdle in perennials is planting something that will survive my small children. Some have taken and outgrown the delicate “will the kids destroy this plant before it establishes itself?” balance. If I could go back I would plant three times as many blueberries and thornless blackberries. I’m propagating the ones I do have because they do so well here insect and climate and surviving kids-wise. If I weren’t working full time and didn’t have small kids to care for, I would go farther out of town and buy more land and a tractor with a tree auger and reforest some monoculture fields into tree crop food forest systems, dig swales, do the whole agroforestry thing on a bigger scale, breed tree crops for deliciousness and adaptation.

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Oh and I built a rainwater collection system and my pump cracked in a freeze a year ago and I haven’t replaced it yet. We did purchase an agricultural water hookup from our water utility, so the water for the plants is cheaper than water for our house, but free would be even more awesome. We live in a traditionally lots of free water from the sky area (east tennessee). There are a lot of systems that would help me (an excavator or mini tractor or something to help scoop and haul woodchips), automatic irrigation, but none of those seem as high a priority as suppressing the bermuda grass in the front yard before planting fruit trees. Slow is hard for me. But the incredible moschata harvest in 2025 is still feeding us right out of our garage, no extra preserving required. That is due to landracing and for that I am very thankful for this community. So even though my baby pawpaws are not producing yet four years in, my domesticated grapes all got some blight, my walking onion patch is infested with bermuda, my italian plums have yet to produce many years in, I still have a garage full of moschata. Baby steps in the garden include the kids seeing what goes into getting plants to make food: our peach tree had its first harvest last year and they were so delicious even though the squirrels carried off 90 percent of them. The matt’s wild cherry tomatoes self seeded thanks to birds even in the cracks of our patio, edges of our lawn, neighbors’ beds, and made amazing tomatoes without any input whatsoever. The variety of food bearing plants in our yard compared to before we moved in four years ago is staggering. Could it be more? Yes. Could it be easier to care for in the future? Yes. Could more plants in our yard just make food with zero input? Absolutely. Can our family survive completely off our land year round if we had to? Not yet. But I have hope and that’s contagious.

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Ola todos,

Started landracing full on in 2022, and went from 800m2 to 3000m2 in 2026, on 2 different sites.

As I’m not the owner of my land, I decided to restrict myself from start to annuals and biannuals.

I’ve been creating as many grexes that I could from start : about 20 - not to mention the dominantly self-pollinating solanaceaes. So carrots, beetroots, leeks, onions, different cabbages, turnips, parsnips, etc. But also grexes of about every cucurbit species that I could get my hands on, i.e… a lot :joy: put also a ton of money into it, to access diversity as fast as I could, thinking the more diversity I would have the more adaptation I would get - nothing special on this forum, right?

And so 2025 was the year I decided to focus more on my beloved crops : cucurbits. Having a girlfriend in a far away country somehow obliged me to make choices. And also I felt that I couldn’t do everything good, and as I connected with my dear friends from the PEPs group I got to an understanding that “ok, if I’m good at something, others will be good at something else”… so I could benefit from their work later in the day. So for me bye-bye faba beans, onions, spinach and a couple others who did’n’t work with my travel timings : I did only summer crops and put a massive effort into it (see my 2025 thread for more). And it’s been quite rewarding - even if, as some may have understood, assessing properly my progresses in selection it appeared that I had made none in some crops. Still the fruits were there, the diversity always incredible. Something like 3 tons of fruits were harvested : a ton of watermelon, 300kg of melons, about 1.5tons of cucurbitas species, 100kg of kiwanos, some cukes, gourds, +about 300kg of tomatoes, 100kg of eggplants, some peppers… all that in plain field.

2026 : I’m once again getting rid of some projects : as I did zero progress on storage pepos, watermelons and melons, and because in those particular projects the taste wasn’t there, I stopped those at 2025 taste selection. It’s a relief : we only have the energy we have, I’m no Superman… So still running are cucurbita maxima and moschata and of course melons and watermelons. I will keep on a side some gourds for fun and some kiwanos because… why not? :wink:. Still some solanaceae also, physalis included, some funky african eggplants… but a lot less than my about 1200 plants of solanaceae last year! Was too much, especially when partaking in participatory group around plain field tomatoes with about 30 varieties to assess on late blight resistance - while having no real interest in tomatoes. Was too much. And with more financial constraints ahead, so less time available, I’ll better simplify things, notably if I/we want serious data on adaptation.

My main take away is that for me, after thousands of hours of work on those different projects, I’m finding balance in focusing only on the couple crops I prefered from start : I mean that I fell in love with squashes 20 years ago, and then came watermelon and melon and I’m pretty good at those. Watermelon being totally rewarding in particular.

So yes I thought I could handle everything in parallel but on the way it appeared it was too much : my carrots, onions and other grexes are erraticly sown, if I find time at the right timing. I now only concentrate on what I particularly loved… from start!! Loving those crops I make strong progresses, encounter many passionnate and knowledgeable people in the cucurbit selection field, they learn from me too - which is cool -, and I will be able to help each other here with seeds first, and also advise on breeding specifics of those one day or another. Just ask.

So yes I totally agree : it’s better not trying to do everything from start! :wink: And it’s better to add things one at a time…

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