Gardening for the first time

 Keeper of the Home is having an Organic Gardening Carnival.  Join in the fun and learning!

 

This was my first year gardening.  Well, I planned one before (you can read about it here), got it planted, it was huge and quickly overgrew with weeds when I discovered that caring for a newborn while pregnant made the garden quickly lose priority.  The only thing I got from that garden was more cucumbers than a person could dream of eating or preserving.  Why is it that the standard garden wastes all the row space, produces so much harvest that your begging family to take some of it off your hands, and takes hours in weeding?  I need simplicity in my life, not another time consuming task, but then again I want fresh, healthily, responsibly grown produce for my family.  What’s a girl to do?

This year was a different story, I found a book called Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew and decided to follow his method.  It worked and I can’t wait until next year.  Forest made me two “boxes” to plant in that are each 2 ft by 4 ft.  Here they are planted and growing mid-spring (with egg shells crushed onto the surface to help get rid of slugs/snails):

The main idea of this method is that if you have good soil your garden will grow.  The area I live in is clay, lots of clay.  So with Mel’s formulated mix of peat, vermiculite, and compost your garden grows in a rather small, but nutrient dense space.  I know there is some question as to how “organic” the mix is, but for me this was the route to take as I knew it would be much more organic than what I was buying at the grocery. 

I had a great spring harvest of spinach, radishes, green onions, and lettuces.  Then for summer I harvested beets when the tomatoes started growing too big.  I don’t have a picture of it, but I planted my tomatoes in the back row and then trained them to grow up a trellis.  The fall plans had to be set aside seeing as our fall has been consuming with family and school.  I had planned to plant and harvest more greens, broccoli and a few other goodies.  I almost forgot my herbs.  In these little boxes I also grew two types of basil, lemon thyme, vicks plant, lemongrass, rosemary, sage, parsley, 2 cilantro plants, chives, and lavender.

The size was perfect for us as it supplemented where our CSA lacked in greens and herbs while providing extra tomatoes and onions for preserving.  Plus, it was manageable with our current lifestyle.  I think that I could do double the size next year just as successful so long a there is nothing else on my daily schedule.  Next year I wuold like to try my hand at carrots, potatoes, garlic and more herbs as well as a few other non-starchy veggies such as broccoli, cauliflower, and maybe even some green beans.

Wrap-up of what I grew for the early and summer season in my 8ft by 2ft space:

• radishes
• different lettuces
• spinach
• onions
• 3 heirloom tomato plants
• beets
• thyme
• vicks plant
• chives
• lemongrass
• rosemary
• sage
• parsley
• cilantro
• lavender

 Neat and tidy, no bending down and digging through for fruits, and minimal to no weeding!  I can’t recommend it enough.

Don’t forget to go to the end of this post and register for my little giveaway….Christmas is coming!