Grow Zone at Deer Creek Homestead
How Our Garden Has Grown Over the Years
We began our vegetable journey with a 25’x50’ garden plot. Dirt was hard as a rock and full of them too. That first year the cows broke through the fence and ate everything that had come up. After we planted a second time the chickens and rabbits wiped us out. By then the summer had come to an end and we had nothing to show for it. Added some dirt and compost, built a taller fence, and added barbed wire the second year, just to have hail destroy it middle of summer, too late to replant. It was time to pivot: We spent the winter planning and designing a 17’x75’ high tunnel, come spring Al bent electrical metallic tubing into a gothic style frame and skinned it in one layer poly strong enough for our high winds and a heavy snow load.
That year we learned planting under poly takes a lot more ventilation and air flow than we provided, many of our plants baked to a crisp before they produced! Only the corn, tomatoes, and some peppers made it to harvest. That winter we read a bunch of books and watched a lot of YouTube to learn how to effectively grow in a high tunnel at our altitude.
We added more dirt and compost that third year and did OK! Our 4th year of gardening was covid, so we had nothing but time to baby the high tunnel and give the outdoor garden another try. That year we were wildly successful and able to share a lot of our produce with neighbors and family, also learning to preserve enough veggies for the year.
Since then, we have focused on what we grow best, we revamped our garage into a temperature-controlled nursery, and even sell our compost and seedlings to other gardeners. Beginning in February we seed start onions, then follow with lettuce and spinach, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, herbs, carrots, beets, potatoes and so on. We still try a few new things every year, but stick with the proven basics that we sell at our local Farmers Market on Saturdays May-Oct.
Eventually we added bee hives, a custom watering system, electric fencing, a ceiling wire trellis system, and repurposed used lumber to make taller planting boxes enabling us to add more dirt and compost inside our high tunnel. Two serious hailstorms in 2025 made swiss cheese out of our poly cover, so we added hail cloth to the outside garden for the following growing season and will reskin the high tunnel when we have time, for now Mother Nature has given us the gift of extra ventilation, ha!
It’s been rewarding to watch our soil health improve every year, figuring out what insects we can coexist with, and enjoy the birds and pollinators our garden and high tunnel attracts.
Get to Know Life at the Deer Creek Homestead
Walk the grounds, meet the animals, and see how the homestead comes to life. A visit is the best way to understand the heart of Deer Creek and the way we live here. If you have a reservation with Campfire Cabins and would like to arrange a tour, please reach out! Check out campfire-cabins.com for information and reservations.
