I have 40 acres that are 62 miles away from me. Currently I have some cows there, but my long term goal is to bring the cows to the farm I live on, and convert that land into a hay farm. The drive is my biggest challenge. It's not just the two hours of travel, but also making sure I have enough time to work on the place while I'm there.
Where I live, we started out with a big open area for a garden. It was about 50x50 feet. I ran my disk through it a bunch of times to break it all up, and create planting rows. We added some fertilizer to the soil and a few other things to improve it.
Veggies grew pretty good, some better then others. Then the weeds took off. It went from a minor thing to keep the weeds under control, to a full blown, overwhelming headache. Then Summer hit, and there wasn't enough water to keep the soil wet, so it became concrete and even harder to weed, but since it's so hot here, and the soil became so hard, the veggies all died on us.
We fought that battle for two years without any significant improvement. Then we went with raised beds. Each bed is 4x16 from treated 2x8's with a 3 foot walkway between them. The walkway was a constant battle to control the grass and weeds until I started spreading mulch. That was a game changer, the mulch makes it easy to remove the occasional weed, and it keeps us from walking in mud. It also makes the garden look really good, which is nice too!!! Every Spring, Lowes has a sale where the 2 cubic foot bags of mulch are $2 each. Last year I bought 6 pallets. This year I bought 4 pallets. Not all of it ended up in the garden last year because we have big dogs and they destroy the grass, so we're spreading mulch there too. But I should have enough this year to finally have every pathway in the garden mulched!!!
I bought quite a few dump truck loads of good, loaming, garden dirt. It's kind of crazy to buy dirt when you have land, but all my dirt is red clay, and the garden dirt is night and day better for growing veggies.
I did four beds the first year, 4 more the next year, then 8 the following year and another 8 the year after that. Now we're planning on another row of 8 beds later in the year, or maybe in the winter months so they will be ready for planting next year.
After having raised beds for awhile now, I'm a complete believer in them. We're getting more veggies, in less area, that's easier to take care of. We're still working on our watering. My wife just finished the Master Gardener program put on by A&M, and she learned that we where doing a lot of things wrong, so more changes to how we're planting, and watering. Everything is on drip hoses now, that's been this years project. I'm running PEX to each bed with it's own valve. Each line does 8 beds, and I adjust the water flow to make them all even with the valves. Before we where using big sprinklers to water the entire area. That worked, but we where wasting a lot of water.
We also learned that too much sun is a bad thing, so we're planting trees on the West side of the garden to provide shade in the afternoon. Morning sun is all we really need to get everything to grow.
As others have suggested, I think you would be more productive, and get better results if you found a place closer to have your garden, or maybe rethink what you are doing at home and see if you can get more out of what you already have.
Since starting the Master Gardener program, my wife has become the "plant rescuer" Friends give her dying plants all the time now, sometimes dozens of them at a time. She has dedicated two of our raised beds to saving these plants. Most are flowering plants of some kind that will end up somewhere on our land. She has also been put in charge of removing all of the flowers at the University Nursing Garden because they are building a new building there. She also volunteers to work at the City Greenhouse
The garden is also a great place to hide Easter eggs!!!
