Solo Parenting & Solo Gardening

A much smaller garden now. But the Raspberries are unreal!

Finding balance in the garden after divorce.

Solo parenting and solo gardening is challenging but I am finding balance. Yes, you read that right. I have now moved into my third garden. Not the way I wanted, of course. It’s smaller than the last one. Usually, when you move to a new garden, you’d like it to be bigger than the last. Well, at my age anyway. I get it, if you’re at the vintage that you are looking to downsize or stop gardening all together. That’s just not where I am in life

Quite the opposite, actually. I am trying to grow a market garden, and to stock my freezer (that I lost in the divorce. I guess I’ll have to get a new one to fill) and root cellar.

My last real go at this was 2023.

The garden was full and we had so much produce that my daughter still won’t eat beets. There were so many.  I still have tomatoes in the freezer to use. I made soups and sauces and even ketchup. It was amazing. This is when I had the idea to expand the website and YouTube channel to include cooking and processing the things you grow.

Things changed

But, just as I was conjuring ideas for this new venture, that included pottery and chickens and other things. Pottery is a new hobby that I was teaching myself to do in the winter. My “partner” decided that this life is not what they wanted anymore. That meant that life had to be put on hold for a bit. A year and a half, actually. I couldn’t garden. I had to take on a part-time job so the banks would like me, and I could get a mortgage on my own.

Coupled with having to run my landscaping projects for other people, this meant less time to spend in my own garden. When your heart is not into something, it is hard to muster the energy to do it. That is the space I was in for the 2024 growing season. It was heartbreaking to walk away from all that progress. I even had to dismantle the chicken coop and hen house before I left.

Check out the YouTube channel

If you want to watch the videos of those builds. Needless to say I didn’t document any of the dismantling. I should have, but It was too hard emotionally to film.

In April of 2025 things started to progress, finally, and I was able to purchase a little house in a community about an hour south of the town I was living in. My, now former, partner and I are co-parenting our two kids, so they technically still live in the same town with their mother. This allows them to stay in their schools. In reality, they live every other week with me. We have done a lot of driving. This cuts down the amount of time I can spend in my garden, but what I am trying to portray with my company, website, property, and overall life is that growing your own food doesn’t have to take up so much time. It doesn’t need to take a huge allotment of time and effort. So we are making it work. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

So, now I’m solo parenting, half time.

Solo Parenting & Solo Gardening with a new garden.

This is what it looked like when I moved in in April. I took this picture while I was unloading the moving truck.

It took a while to get here. I had to move to a new community to find affordable housing, and luckily, the house I could afford came with established garden beds. The above picture is what it looked like when my kids and I came back from 3 weeks away. That is why it looks overgrown and the grass needs to be cut. Cut me some slack. There was a lot going on!

In my family April, May and June are the busiest months. April marks the start of the lacrosse season for my son, basketball and swimming for my daughter. Both of their birthdays are in May. June is the end of the school year, which means concerts and band recitals and field trips and half days. On top of all of that, my kids and I had a massive trip planned for the first 3 weeks of July. We drove my sisters pick up truck and holiday trailer from Alberta to Halifax (she moved back east the previous summer but had to leave them behind) and attended a family reunion and wedding while we were there. If you know Canada, that’s a long trip. It took us 11 days to drive to the reunion.

Prepping before we left

The best I could do before we left was to pull the unwanted plants (aka weeds) from the beds and plant what seeds I had left over from 2023. That was in June. I purchased the place in April, so I didn’t even get the water turned on to the outside tap until the end of July. I then realized the outside tap doesn’t work, so my garden went all year without being watered on a regular basis. Luckily, this was the wettest July in a very long time, so Mother Nature has really helped me out in that respect. The Raspberries loved it!

Finding balance as August rolls around and we settle back into the week to week switch. On Sundays the kids switch from parent to parent. The weeks that they are here I try not to work away too much. It seems like it would be easy to just leave them here for the day as I go to work on other peoples’ properties. The oldest is 13 and has her babysitting certificate and the younger brother is 10, so they are pretty good at being solo, together. The problem lies in that I don’t want to leave them. One of the balances of this life is the balance between the kids being “latch-key kids” and being able to keep a roof over us. Once school goes back in, things will change again.

Growing our own food is a integral part of finding balance.

I also have to harvest and process the things we grow. Historically, I built the gardens and plant the seeds. I would irrigate and weed, but harvesting was the other partner. I would make soups and sauces in the fall, sure, as the late veggies ripened. But now, I have to do it all. That takes time. Time I often didn’t have. At least this year.

Solo Parenting & Solo Gardening – Wrapping up the first season

Now that it is October and it has taken me 3 months to just finish writing this page. I have time to reflect on the year in the garden. This could be a whole other page really, but I’ll touch on a few things.

I didn’t have a lot of time to plan the garden this year and that is okay. My organic landcare training tells me to take the first year and learn what is there already before doing anything, especially before adding anything. The fact there were existing garden beds made it possible to have a vegetable garden at all which was a blessing.

I forgot the permaculture principles when planting everything in haste this spring. I would have used way more of the lettuce and ate more salads if the greens were planted closer to the door. Next year I plan to plant the greens in the half whiskey barrels that are right outside the front door.

Finding balance does take a little time

I need to schedule time into my weeks to harvest and process the produce as it ripens. The majority of the raspberries, for example, went to the birds because I could not find time to harvest and process them when they were ripening. The raspberry patch was one of the main selling points for me with this house, so as much as its okay that the birds got most of them this year, its still frustrating to have to buy jam this winter.

Finally (at least for this post), without the time and ability to plan, I seriously under utilized the garden space I have. There are 3 garden beds I didn’t even use this year. And 2 others that were overgrown by the things in the adjacent beds. But, now that I have one growing season behind me in this garden, I can take this winter and actually plan what to do next year and I’ll be ready for it.