(This is the second post in the series! See here, for The Beginning!)
In 2011 we purchased and moved into our current home. Just under four acres, former farm ground, surrounded by fields on three sides, and partially wooded. The home itself was in poor shape, but we had the courage and naivety to believe we could have it in tip-top shape shortly after moving in! (We’re still making repairs and renovations 8 years later.)
As soon as the ground thawed, I jumped to action. My husband borrowed a push behind tiller and we decided on a flat location a few hundred yards from the house for our first garden. I was over-the-moon in love with it already! Even while my husband struggled to till the rock hard ground, I KNEW this would be the year everything worked out as planned.
And that year was better than before. We harvested enough zucchini to make bread for our wedding that fall. That’s really the only thing I remember from that year. The zucchini. Sooooo many zucchini.
The ground was unbelievably hard. So many years of tilling, followed by mowing and rolling once it had been turned into a homesite. After the first rain, the soil returned to its near bare state. Barely inhabitable for the zucchini we grew, but the perfect opportunity for crabgrass, clover, purslane, and dandelions.
A shot of Jig, the cat, and a look at the ground we had to work with. Barely sustaining weeds, dry, cracked, and hard as stone. 
My raised bed for strawberries. After several years, the most we had ever harvested from this patch was a small bowl full in one year. Oh, but I was SO very proud of that small bowl!
The years that followed were similar. We dabbled in raised beds, invested in a tractor with a pull behind tiller, and a small hand held cultivator to run periodically between the rows to maintain the never ending onslaught of weeds. We would bring in load after load of manure at the end of every season (never noticing the patches that wouldn’t grow anything after). Each year the garden expanded to accommodate the losses we expected. The overspray of herbicides from the neighboring field would kill off the closest few feet of the garden every year, I started using Seven dust (per recommendations of my older, wiser patients who garden. I was, at the time, a dental hygienist and fully in love with chickens, gardening, and learning to how to preserve our garden treasures.)
The Great Strawberry Harvest for our traditional, tilled garden. 
Sunsets like this have always been apart of what draws me to spending so much time outside. It feels like God paints the sunset just for us, to get us to slow down and be in reverence of Him.
In 2016, our first son was born. Stirling Michael, a tiny young man at only 5lbs 15oz who captured our hearts before he was even born. My time in the garden became exponentially more important and personal during that year. Working in the garden helped me feel connected to my old self, a time before late nights taming a crying baby, days in the same pair of pajamas (were they even dirty if they weren’t covered in spit-up?), and constant outside input on how I should be spending my days during my maternity leave. While motherhood was a beautiful and rewarding experience, like many others, I struggled. My sweet husband tried to help in the garden and chicken chores, but he had done the unspeakable a few years prior (pulling out ALL of my tomato seedlings, mistaking them for weeds) and I struggled with letting go of control.
2017 was the first year I felt the full weight of failure. It was early in the season. Our flock of chickens had heavily contracted mites, the garden was barely scraping along with the help of Miracle Grow and Sevin dust, and I was exhausted. Being a mommy, an almost full-time hygienist, and a wife left little time for the garden.
Mommy found her gardening time after the little man went to sleep. 
This was the last day of our traditional garden. I was too afraid to feed the family anything harvested, because of how much Sevin dust I had used to try and combat the insects, and had given up on The Battle of the Weeds.
I turned to searching the internet and stumbled upon Justin Rhode’s channel. His family’s videos were quirky, informational, and honestly showed the successes and struggles they had as a homesteading family. I had their channel playing most every morning while I did household chores. They were family friendly and I learned so much listening to them while doing other things. One of the things they focused on was the use of chickens in the garden and they kept mentioning this unfamiliar term, permaculture. I began joining groups on permaculture, and passively looking into their ideas and how to implement them into our existing garden. It was during the summer of this year during one of the Rhode’s video binge that I heard it switch off his channel and onto a documentary. “Back to Eden” had come on, and for some reason, instantly caught my attention. I paused the video and saved it to watch during nap time.
At this point, I would highly recommend checking out the free documentary yourself, and hopefully it will help you understand why we decided to make a drastic change in our garden and how we live our lives. (Check back in for the next part of this series!)