Gardening
I didn’t grow up gardening. My family didn’t garden and it wasn’t encouraged in my youth. I happened upon growing my own plants after stomach issues had me rethinking the food I was eating. Once I started growing a few of my own vegetables, I was hooked! I didn’t start small with just a few plants….not my style. Instead, I somehow managed to plant a little bit of every vegetable I thought I could grow into a newly cleared spot in our backyard. By the end of that first summer, I was overwhelmed trying to figure out why the tomato plants weren’t producing fruit, keeping animals out of the garden after they successfully ate all my beans, and running out to water daily so the plants wouldn’t die. Still, I produced enough to find it worth my while. Soon, I started learning about vegetables that complement each other, how much heat and/or cold many types of vegetable plants liked, and the need for regular watering and feeding, among many other things. I learned so many lessons my first couple of years, and continue to do so many years later.
Raised Garden Boxes
Four years ago, we moved from our large piece of property into a house closer to town with an average size backyard surrounded by fences on all sides. As excited as we were to live with the conveniences of being closer to town, I was quite unsure how my gardening adventures would continue. Enter a wonderful company, Gold Feather Gardens. Jamie Brennan, Founder and CEO, was just starting her kitchen garden consulting business, using raised garden boxes in her garden designs, and I loved this, new-to-me, idea of gardening vertically to use less ground space. As it turns out, our much smaller yard combined with my continued desire to grow a wide variety of vegetables ended up to be a perfect fit for us.
Mike loved the idea, too, and promptly started learning about building raised garden boxes. While designing our garden space, Mike did a great job researching and through many iterations working on different sizes and shapes, we finally decided on a variety that worked for our garden space. Once constructed and installed, we added trellises to help with the vertical growth (and therefore much more growing space) of our smaller footprint in the back corner of our yard.
Working with Gold Feather Gardens combined with all our planning and research paid off! Our garden exploded with so many vegetables that first year and we were inspired to do more. After sharing our raised garden box growing success with many interested neighbors and family members, we started building garden boxes for them. Word got out and people noticed the quality of the product we were building. We slowly expanded by selling our garden boxes to customers all throughout the Treasure Valley area and selling to a few D&B Supply stores.
Today, we continue to grow our business organically and still operate as a family-run shop. We now sell our raised garden boxes at all the D&B Supply stores, North End Organic Nursery (NEON), and through many garden landscape contractors who also recognize the value of incorporating garden boxes into their yard designs. We continue to share success stories, now coming from our customers’ garden successes.
Backyard gardening is now our livelihood, and we are so grateful our path led us here. For more information on our raised garden boxes, submit an order request or contact us today!