Gardening was not exactly a new idea in either of our families. Both of us grew up with gardens in the picture somewhere, but that did not mean we grew up planning our lives around them. Tim had more experience with gardening when he was young, but not much of it carried into later years. Rachel, meanwhile, had very little interest in gardening at all. There were plenty of things she could imagine enjoying more than spending summer afternoons pulling weeds, fighting bugs, and trying to convince plants to behave themselves.

Somewhere along the way, however, life developed other plans. Fast-forward a few years and suddenly there are seven children and four adults to feed, grocery prices that seem determined to prove they can always go higher, and a growing conviction that the more of our own food we can produce, the better. A garden stops looking quite so optional when eleven people can make a respectable pile of food disappear in remarkably short order. What began as an attempt to stretch the grocery budget has grown into something much larger: a way to put healthier food on the table, teach our children where food actually comes from, become less dependent on what happens to be available at the store, and slowly build the skills we will need as the homestead grows.

That does not mean we suddenly became expert gardeners. Quite the opposite. The garden has been, and continues to be one long education in how much we do not know. We have learned that plants have surprisingly strong opinions about where they intend to grow, pests can discover a squash plant with greater efficiency than we can, a trellis is sometimes merely a suggestion, and something that looked perfectly healthy yesterday may wake up this morning having entered an entirely new phase of its personal crisis. We experiment, read, observe, make mistakes, try again, occasionally stumble onto something that works wonderfully, and then immediately start wondering how we could improve it.

Many Hands Garden is where we share the planting and harvesting, varieties we grow, soil and fertility experiments, pests and problems, successes worth repeating, failures worth remembering, and the lessons we are still learning. This is not the garden of people who already know everything. It is the garden of a family trying to grow more of its own food every year, learning how to work with the land we have, and discovering just how much food, knowledge, frustration, laughter, and satisfaction can come out of a patch of dirt.