Isn’t that always the way it seems when you’re young and full of energy?  Then one morning you wake up and have a job and family to take care of and it seems the things you really enjoyed doing as a child becomes work.

I began in the grocery industry over 30 years ago working mainly in the capacity as a Produce Manager for various supermarkets.  In those years I have compiled a lot of information concerning fruits and vegetables.  You might ask yourself what a Produce Man would know about growing
Gardens…and this would be an honorable question.

In working as a Produce Manager, I came to find out much about where a good portion of our Produce comes from…how it’s grown and how unhealthy much of it can be.

This is the reason that I choose to raise a good portion of my own food every year.

In 1998 I decided to enter into the Farming business.  I began raising Organic Elephant Garlic on a commercial basis and that’s where much my education on gardening really began. 

Now I didn’t go out and buy a couple thousand acres, or buy an existing farm…I started with just 3 acres.  However, when you are working a full time job along with the farming; then you are jumping from out of the frying pan into the fire.

I started out on a very small scale planting only 1 acre of Garlic.  I didn’t have a tractor, plow, disc, harvester or a bunch of folks that I could send out to do the job for me.  It was just me and my wife.  This was marital bliss at its finest.

I tilled up that ground with my trusty TroyBilt  roto-tiller and became exceedingly grateful that at least we didn’t have to walk behind a horse driven plow anymore.  It took me weeks to break up that ground.  Then the Garlic had to be planted.  I didn’t have a $40,000.00 machine to do this, so the wife and I got on our hands and knees with a little garden spade and planted each and every bulb by hand. 

I’m still waiting for the wife to forgive me!

Then of course, the Garlic had to be watered, fertilized, weeded and harvested, dried, packaged and shipped.   All of this of course, had to be done after a full days work at our jobs and on every day off …not to mention every vacation.

We produced some wonderful Elephant Garlic.  I was able to sell everything I could grow, with requests for more.  And of course, I couldn’t let all those people down, so we expanded the next year.  And this is why I choose to write the Simple Gardens series of ebooks.  We spent years of working without a day off, or a vacation that would take us to some exotic island just to relax.

And as if the job and farming didn’t keep me busy enough…I had to have my garden.  Even after my wife looked at me with those tired blue eyes and with that long drawn out question… “Don’t you think we have enough to do?”  My answer of course, was emphatically “Yes…but honey”

So we had our jobs and we had our farm, but nothing would keep me from my garden.  In those extremely laborious years I had to think about ways in which to cut down the amount of work that it took to accomplish all these tasks…and I did. 

I no longer farm due to a couple of injuries, but I still love to garden; therefore, I thought it would only be fitting to share with you how I raised my gardens with less than half the work or the effort that most folks employ in a growing season.

Our hope is that gardeners will be able to employ the methods in these booklets and have tremendous results with less than half the work.

Thank you and great gardening!

Gary Brill