Hi!
Welcome to Sunny Home Gardens! I am hoping this will be a great place to learn about flowers, edible fruits and vegetables, as well as fun ornamentals and houseplants. As well as a place to go to find inspiration for your garden.
My name is Jenny and I love to garden! I love adding flowers into our landscaping where I can.
I grew up on a hobby farm with several different animals and a large garden every year. My Dad made sure to instill a love of gardening in his kids.
Each year my Dad would take my sister and I to the store to pick out which vegetables and fruits we wanted to add to our garden for that year. We did a bit of seed saving from certain plants each year as well. Our favorites to plant was several different types of tomato plants, zucchini, corn, and cucumbers. We also had a strawberry patch.
During this time my Dad, sister and I would also grow tons of flowers to make bouquets and sold them to a local farm stand. My sister and I were able to share the profits from our sales. We made sure to save some flower seed to use for growing these flowers the following year.
In later years we moved to a different farm and had a huge fruit and nut orchard. At this point, I was in college and rented a second house that was on my parents’ property. There was a huge abundance of apples and pears so I learned how to can and make applesauce as well as apple butter.
I feel so lucky in that my husband loves to garden just as much as I do. We’ve always had a fruit and vegetable garden.
When we were first married we lived on an incredibly large lot in a small town and had a huge garden. We planted our favorites again such as peas, beans, several varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, artichokes, asparagus and more. We also planted a couple rows of cane berries such as blackberries and raspberries.
Fruit trees were another well-loved item we added. Each year we added more and tried to make sure it was something edible.
Our current house does not have a large lot and what we have hasn’t been the best for growing plants in. We still make the best of it, but realizing the back half of our property used to be a road and now has a thin layer of dirt over it and our front yard is a giant hill has made us be creative. We’ve found container gardening to be perfect way to gain some gardening space in our backyard.
Importance of Gardening
Gardening has always been an important part of my life. Even on years when I didn’t do much gardening, I still had my houseplants and and planted at least a veggie or two in our garden. This year though, gardening has been invaluable. It’s been a topic I could share with my Dad as he has been navigating health struggles and memory issues.
My Dad was recently diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma with kidney failure. A few weeks before this, he had a bad fall where he hit his head on concrete and lost most of his memory, except for his childhood.
Gardening has been invaluable to him during this time. While he was being diagnosed, he was in the hospital for a week in February. My sisters and I took turns sitting with him. Seed packets we had purchased at the store to give him something to look forward to as well as a few seed catalogs were many, MANY hours of conversation with him.
He couldn’t remember the names of different plants, but thumbing through the seed catalog, he’d stop and circle a plant with his finger and tell me why that plant was so amazing and we needed to add it to our list of plants to grow this year.
Once he was out of the hospital, he has spent as much time as he can out in his garden, from walking around planning what to plant next, planting seeds and plants, just playing around in his garden or showing his Grandkids and kids around his garden and new greenhouse. This has not only helped keep him sane and take his mind off everything going on, but it’s helped him keep his strength up.
I am currently spending Saturdays with my Dad at dialysis. We have 3.5 hours to fill with conversation and my Dad would prefer us talking the entire time. Since my life isn’t all that exciting and we talk on the phone almost everyday, conversation can be hard to come by. lol. Once again gardening and plants have come to the rescue. When a new gardening catalog comes, I make sure to bring it for my dialysis days so we can look at different varieties of plants and flowers and what we might want to plant for next year.
We talk about his new greenhouse that was finished up a few weeks after he was released from the hospital. He tells me what plants he’s added, I tell him about seeds or plants that I just received or have planted and how they are doing. We talk about experiments we want to perform in the garden and how we think they’ll go. I tell him about gardening “hacks” I see on Tiktok or Facebook and we talk about what we think about that.
With all the chaos he feels with everything going on around him, words escaping him a lot of the time for what things are called, gardening brings him comfort and purpose. He’s like a little kid again dreaming of what he’s going to plant and anticipating the harvest.