I am so excited. And nervous. I feel like I’m once again waiting for my due date to roll around. And in some respects my anticipation is due to birth: well, re-birth, renewal, new beginnings… it’s all about Spring this time.
I had thought that after moving into this house I’d have to wait at least a year to be able to plant anything. I kept resolutely telling myself that was fine – that I needed to get a feel for the lay of the land anyway, and that one year without a veggie patch wouldn’t kill me. (I couldn’t just start a tiny one in the corner of a yard, you see, because after tracking the sunlight with videos and cameras we realized that there is not one place on our property that gets direct sun for more than an hour and a half a day.) The previous owners sure loved their trees. No, there was no way to get a veggie patch without first chopping down some trees. Well, all that extra land was what we bought this house for, after all. It’d just take a little extra time and effort.
It’s just that there were all sorts of reasons why we couldn’t do it this year. We didn’t have the money; I’m scared of chainsaws; our county goes crazy with the permits; we couldn’t possibly pay someone to pull all those stumps, and besides then we’d need more permits and architecturally engineered plans to show to drainage and sediment committees; we didn’t want to irritate the neighbors the first year.
Nonetheless, after several weepy incidents, contractor bids that came in at about 25% of what I had imagined it would cost, and a realization of just how addicted I am to this self-sufficiency thing, we’re going ahead with it anyway. That’s right – come Tuesday (or two-weeks-from-now-Tuesday, if this weekend’s predicted 3 feet of snow haven’t melted yet) – I will be the proud owner of 9/10 of an acre of woods, plus a treeless stumpy patch of about 4,500 square feet. Enough for a vegetable patch that – with luck and a lot more dedication than a parent with a toddler can possibly deliver – should feed two people all year. Not enough for livestock (except my bees and possibly some chickens), not enough to grow wheat for our flour (I’ve calculated that we’d need about 1/8 acre, 5400 feet, to grow all our wheat). And the goats will have to come later. (Oh yes, Josh, come they will.)
The price of the bids was helped by the fact that the drainage is so poor in there that I must build raised beds anyway… so why pull the stumps when I could just cut them flush to the ground and build beds right on top of them? The stumps will decompose (if I help them along) within two years anyway.
Plans are underway. Multiple fruit trees, vines, and bushes (the bare minimum for the first year, I told myself, consoling myself that every year I can get more, as if 4 wouldn’t be enough for most people) will be delivered in a couple months. I’ve used dozens of pages of grid paper to plan every foot of my garden down to the square inch. I have spent many evenings studiously researching average veggie consumption habits to determine how much of what to plant.
But now that the time is at hand and contracts are signed, I’m getting that what-if-I’m-terribly-wrong feeling. I’m suffering a crisis of conscience about beginning my garden only halfway as North as it could be: what if later I want to expand it all the way North (about 50 more feet) to the street, but then the orchard is already in the way and will shade all the other plants I try to grow back there? What if the drainage turns out to be more of an issue, or I can’t plant the orchard right because there are stumps in the way, and how do I make allowances now for where to put the chicken coop, shed, and apiary in the future, and …. what if, what if, what if. I want to get it exactly right the first try.
The uncertainty, the anxiety, the irrepressible excitement of really beginning, really finally beginning the mini farm I’ve dreamed about for so many years… it really is like approaching a due date.