Nobody plans to move in the middle of harvest season.Strategic Planning
And yet, here we are: three weeks out from our move date, and the garden is fuller than I anticipated. After 10 years on our 160-acre ranch in the central interior of BC, we’re relocating to a smaller 16-acre farm, and I need a plan for every single crop still growing out there.
I planted 600 cloves of garlic last October and pulled them out of the ground this week. I am not going to pretend that was not emotional, because this particular harvest carries more weight than usual. This garlic is not just for our kitchen. It is the seed stock for next year’s crop at our new farm, the first tangible step toward the farm store I have been working toward for years.
When we decided to move our family off our 160-acre ranch in central BC, the thing that worried me most was not packing the house or selling the equipment. It was the garden.
Six years of perennial plants. Haskaps that fruit before anything else in the yard. Comfrey that feeds the apple trees without being asked. Raspberries that have taken over in the best possible way. Plants we chose carefully for our cold climate and that took years to establish.
There was no way I was leaving all of it behind.
This ranch has been home for nearly a decade. One hundred and sixty acres of meadow, mountain, and sky in British Columbia, homesteaded in the early 1920s by the sons of neighbouring farmers who had been working this land since 1906. When we bought it, we knew it was old. We didn’t fully understand yet how much of that history was still here, waiting to be discovered.
Some weeks the garden gets your full attention. Other weeks, life is loud and your motivation is somewhere else entirely. This June has been one of those weeks for me.
I recently experienced a moment in the garden that felt like a significant step forward in my self-sufficiency journey. I managed to grow enough ginger here in my northern garden (Zone 3) to last our family for nearly the entire year.
