Garden Lessons Learned: From Farm-Style to City Backyard

When we moved to our current home in the summer of 2023, I was set on testing out the western section of the yard for a secluded kitchen garden. While we’re on a large corner lot and much of the yard was and still is, quite barren, I found myself enjoying the privacy found in that small section between the house and the neighbor’s fence. It was lush with green weeds and grass, a good sign that it received adequate sunlight. I had a vision of robust raised garden beds filled with vegetables, herbs and flowers, my wooden chair for relaxing in the sunshine. And for the most part, this vision has become reality – but I’ve learned so much along the way!

Summer 2025

The fun part for me in gardening, besides the bounty, is in the experimentation. And I did (very accurately) expect to see some level of struggle working in this space. I have known gardening my whole life. But as you can see from the '2020' images above, I’m accustomed to in-ground gardening in large sunny rows with irrigation lines. In the shift, I found myself making rookie mistakes and encountering new garden issues I’d never delt with before. In this post I’ll be sharing my gardening wins and losses over the last 2 years as I’ve navigated my new space - I hope you learn something from them too!

              In short, my setup process was the following: summer and fall of 2023 I cleared some space, set up super small raised beds, knowing they would be a temporary test space. I made 3 tiny beds along the house that year, only about 8 inches deep, using repurposed fence wood. One bed was all ground soil, which is very tough with clay here, just as it is on the farm where I grew up, another bed I mixed in bagged acid soil to test blueberry bushes in (i had never grown them) and the last bed I mixed with bagged GroMulch and Gardening soil. In Spring of 2024 I planted 3 tomatoes, some strawberries, blueberries and zucchini. Some plants totally flopped, others did just fine! My tomatoes in particular did fantastic! And so knowing the space had potential that fall I cleaned out the spent plants, broke down the temporary beds and set myself up for spring 2025, 3 large raised beds and 3 large pots for special plantings. This time I set the beds away from the building, centering them in the space to allow for walkways on all sides of the beds, then I weeded all around, lined the space with weed cloth barrier and topped with several inches of mulch. Each new bed got ground soil, aged manure, bagged garden soil and GroMulch which I've determined is a fantastic combination. I planted several tomato plants, zucchini plants, berries, herbs, carrots, greens, flowers, grapes, and green beans. I even put an irrigation line in! Here'd what I found along the way -

Testing the Limits of Proper Spacing 

 If you’ve ever seen posts from Gardenary, you know the wild overfilled garden bed is all the rage lately. (go look them up on Instagram or Pinterest!) This wild gardening method is all about stuffing garden beds to the brim, no bare soil in site, mixing plants of differing sizes, shapes and colors to mimic the layers and diversity found in nature. Despite the challenges this look poses, I jumped right into the chaos.

Here’s the lesson- It’s all about balancing the space between large and small plants. You have to know exactly how little is too little when it comes to space and be ready to play with plant heights and shapes too.

My main mistakes were in still thinking of plants in terms of rows and patches. When I thought of a plant to add, my mind jumped to finding a single spot to plant a group of that item, instead of balancing them out among all the beds. My brain wants to plant a tomato patch all clustered together rather then 1-2 plants per bed, which would have done way better!

In Spring 2025 my north bed got tomatoes since it’s the biggest of my 3 beds. But I still took it a little too far! I planted 8 plants originally (What was I thinking?!) and ended up encountering several issues. Firstly, just a simple fight for light, the plants along the east side of the bed struggled in the shade of the western plants and so last month I decided to end their suffering and simply remove them from the bed to reduce competition for nutrients. (I wrongly assumed San Marzano tomatoes were a Determinate height variety since they're so often compared to Roma's! They're not! These plants are huge!) In 2026 I'll go back to what I did in 2024, stick to 2-4 tomato plants total for the garden, less plants but healthier and more productive. I also, instead of placing 1-2 tomatoes per bed, stuffed them all into 1 bed (my brain still wants to cluster plants in patches!), so next spring I'll spread them out among the beds, which will also help me test which is the best bed for tomatoes.

Secondly – Spider mites! The beefsteak tomato I planted at the north of the bed, although grows great and produces well, has been riddled with little webs for months! In a large farm garden, the extra spacing allows for adequate airflow and sunshine to deter pests like these. In my new beds between the building and the fence, there’s not much wind. Sunshine is limited to the middle hours of the day and so adequate spacing becomes much more important, as well as pruning excess foliage from the inner branches, which I wasn’t used to doing as much. I've sprayed it down with water on the hose jet-setting, sprayed it down with 'Safer' brand neem oil a couple times and while the pests haven't spread to the other plants, they haven't budged either, so I'm pulling the plant out to prevent spread.

Removing struggling, dead or pest/disease riddled plants from the garden to prevent spread is a good idea!

I also made the rookie mistake of not planning for proper staking. In the original tiny beds my tomatoes grew to a stout height, easily controlled with tomato cages and 5ft stakes, I didn’t anticipate the success the larger deeper beds would provide and the plants are much taller! So when I removed the struggling tomatoes I also setup a new stake style – a panel similar to the Florida-Weave Method. Three 8ft t-post stakes with sturdy cattle panel style fencing secured between. This allows you to grow the tomatoes flat on the fence trellis-style which will help with airflow. I also like this setup because it will transition well between seasons, when my tomato plants stop producing, baby snap pea vines will be reaching the perfect height to start weaving up the fence in their place! (I love snap peas and am growing 3 colors this fall!)

Besides the spider mites, I also encountered scale! I have 3 large black plastic grow pots for perennials/evergreens that wont be pulled out at the end of each season, in one of them I have 2 young fig trees. I was so delighted to get to harvest fruits in my first summer growing fig but soon after my first few pickings I noticed lots of ants on the trees as well as brown 'scales' on some of the leaves. I watched them for a few weeks before inspecting deeply, at which point I realized they were completely coating the undersides of several leaves, I clipped off and disposed of the infested leaves, pulled any remaining fruit and sprayed the tree down with more neem oil mix. I'll let you know how it goes! Again, this was new to me, city gardening is a whole new world!

Zucchini is wildly easy to grow and notoriously productive. But the initial mini beds last year failed miserably at growing them, I didn't grow a single squash. This Spring I planted 2 baby starts, both plain green varieties side by side in the southmost bed, which gets the most afternoon sun. The 2 plants grew with vigor and ended up being fairly productive plants! I harvested almost daily through majority of the summer. Now though, as we enter September the plants are giving out, not because of pests, disease or poor health but because they grew so large they flopped over the side of the bed and the growing top of the plant touched the ground, causing the plant to try to grow upward again, causing a cramped "U" shape which put stress on the emerging leaves, flowers and baby zucchini. This issue didn't hit till the end of august. Overall, I would call this Zucchini experience a success and I'll likely grow them in a similar fashion next year!

As you probably know, I love Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and in spring I had ordered a corn called 'Art Verrells White'. Its a small dwarf sweet corn. Again, I planted a cluster rather than small groupings, the plants suffered and produced wimpy 3 inch cobs, I pulled the plants out and fed them to my sheep! Next year, unless I clear space for a new planting bed to the north where I can really spread out, I probably wont plant any corn.

Green beans are another easy to grow and productive plant for the summer veggie garden. I planted a patch (because of course I did) right next to my zucchini plants. Although very tightly spaced, they've done great! I sowed the seeds a bit late, maybe in late May and I've harvested several heaping bowlfuls and will continue to harvest easily till the end of this month. I grew 'Blue Lake Bush' this year and next year I plan to go back to my all time favorite, 'Provider Bush'. Instead of planting in a patch I'll spread mini clusters throughout the beds along the edges so they can flop over the sides.

Carrots are known for being a little hard to grow, mostly due to their long germination time, meaning after seeding it takes a long time to see sprouts compared to other seedlings. Also the seeds are small and need to be planted shallow, meaning you need to be extra diligent in keeping the top layer of soil moist for the first 2-3 weeks after seeding. A new thing I learned this year was that intense heat can stunt carrot growth and that rich soils can promote more green tops rather than thick roots. I planted (a patch!! you guessed it!!) a small section in my middle bed, next to some leafy greens and herbs. I thinned the seedlings to make room for good roots, feeding the thinning's to our rabbit, and during the summer picked a few good bundles for fresh sautéed sides with dinner. I'm excited for fall because cold weather brings out more sugars in the carrots so I picked up a few packets of rainbow blends! Although they're a little fussy to grow, I must say its just too much fun harvesting them! I plan to grow them every season!

So how do I plan to mitigate the spacing issues during this fall planting season? Well, instead of planting on whim, I've drawn out the below plan for each of the 3 beds. If I can successfully stick to this layout I should have much better results!

I'm also working on a very exciting change in the garden right now! I'm expanding the garden to the north with an in-ground bed! This area, beyond the garage will get some extra airflow and sunlight and make for a more practical space for larger plants. My goal is to get this done before the end of the month so that I can grow more this fall but my hard deadline for myself is really March of 2026 so that next years spring garden will be expanded for sure. I'll also be moving our chicken coop over next to this new bed. I think they'll enjoy the space a lot!

What were your gardening wins and losses this year?? And what's your plans for improvement?