Our gardening and homesteading posts on Steem have inspired me to start my own garden!

Inspiration on Steem!

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These posts on Steem most motivated me to begin applying what I learned reading here in my own backyard especially when combined with meeting so many of us at Steemfest 2!

1. Homesteading Saved My Life by @sthomestead was the first post I read on Steem about #homesteading. Thank you to @winvideos for recommending this post which was featured in upvotable 8.
2. The Remarkable Diary of an Earthship Eco Builder Chapter #2. The dream was born. by @eco-alex gave me a new vision of what to build in the future instead of simply a newer and bigger house.
3. Have Too Much Food In Your Garden? Give It Away! Join The "Food Is Free" Project This Year by @lyndsaybowes shows the incredible difference we can make by growing a garden at home with so much food we can give it away! If just a few of our neighbors had gardens like this, most of us could count on never missing a meal! Thank you @colorado-girl for recommending this for upvotable #15.
4. Fruitsandveggiesmonday by @lenasveganliving : Gardening was one of the first posts I have read in my entire life seeing a garden made at home from start to finish and stayed with me until I realized that when I started gardening I could also document the adventure here! Thank you to @luckysteem for recommending this post in upvotable #23
5. @gardenbsquared shows us how easy it is to grow our own pineapples which I did not consciously remember reading when weeks later I all the sudden got an urge to grow my own pineapples! Now seeing this post again I realize this post was likely responsible for the idea which I then attributed to myself instead of the blog post! Thank you to @bolaamir who earned 10 SBD for the recommendation in upvotable 31!

Those are just the articles I can recall from inclusion in my previous posts and there are at least twice that many more that I also read and enjoyed!

The First Step

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After reading the posts above, the first step for me on this journey to garden began with realizing absurdity of my own living where I have a yard growing grass I cannot eat that costs money to get help with maintaining each week. I wrote a post about it named Why Grow Grass and Buy Food? #168 which planted the seed for me to get started as soon as the time was right.

Thank you also to @laurabanfield's mother Holly and my daughter Madeleine for loving gardening together so much which inspired me to take action instead of just reading posts!

The Time is Right!

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A few months ago, I made a beginning by trying to grow pineapples using the heads from the fruits I bought at the store despite Holly's recommendation that I try something easier. A few weeks ago I finally gave up and threw out all of the pineapples I was trying to grow. After throwing them out, I realized it was time to get to work in the garden outside and grow something easier that produces a harvest faster!

With the routines I have setup daily, I often have ideas long before the right time comes to take action. Ironically, anything that is challenging, "bad", or traumatic in my life often inspires me to move forward with whatever I have been putting off. On the day after Christmas two weeks ago, my dog Peaches had an altercation with my daughter Madeleine resulting in a trip with Madeleine and @laurabanfield to All Children's Hospital for five stitches and a lot of gratitude for nothing worse.

After significantly above average amounts of crying, I experienced what felt like a mental housecleaning for the next several days resulting in intense clarity and a 95% reduction in the amount of thoughts in the brain including sometimes several minutes with not one thought while driving, sitting, or walking. The day after our trip to the hospital, I cleared my usual schedule consisting of working online and spent all day with my family. That day I went with Madeleine to Home Depot and bought all of the initial supplies for our garden and began setting everything up!

Pants Off Home Depot!

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Madeleine liked the phrase "Pants off, dance off" which has been helpful for potty training recently. Somehow she turned this into "Pants off Home Depot" and now that is how I think of it too. Home Depot is a huge home improvement warehouse store near where I live in Saint Petersburg, Florida with everything we needed to start our garden! Here is what we bought on a total of two trips!

Lots of seeds!

Soil for grow bags and pots because we pretty much have sand in the backyard.

Spinach

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35 spinach plants because I was afraid of buying less and making a mess all over the car. Buying all six containers allowed me to buy the bottom also which made it easy to bring them home!

20 Home Depot 5 gallon buckets to use as portable pots.

@laurabanfield was aware of my gardening interest before I was ready to take action and had bought me these 15 gallon grow bags weeks before!

Here is what it looked like to begin in the backyard which had one kale plant from @laurabanfield's mom Holly that I had paid little attention to for the month before that ...

Tomatoes

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Madeleine and I began by planting the tomatoes I had picked up at Home Depot including drilling holes in the buckets to allow for drainage.

Week 1!

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From turning a mostly barron backyard full of dog poop into the beginning of a garden in one week feels like a miraculous transformation! Here is the entire garden after the first week!

I am very grateful to have the opportunity to document this from the very beginning and to remain accountable to you here for the growth in my garden each week! For my new happier people blog and podcast videos, I will begin filming these in the garden using the new setup that @tomasgeorge helped me setup!

Thank you very much for joining us on this first week of gardening and we would love to hear your experience with gardening to make this post most valuable in the comments!

Love,
Jerry Banfield