How It’s Going: The Garden

One-corner view of our garden. (More beds lurk unseen to the right.)

Baby strawberries. I know I'd yield more if I tended them better, but we still get a couple weeks' worth of berries every year.

I keep this mint in a halved wine cask so it doesn't root in the yard and take over (mint loves to take over). This is the same mint you'll find in our bottled herbs.

Peas and carrots already starting to show themselves.

The beans have grown faster than expected this year (though they clearly need water). They'll grow taller than the fencing by season's end.

I'm experimenting with onions this year, planting them around our yellow tomatoes, a strain that tends to bush and take over a whole raised bed.

This week, I'll need to go through several rows (like this arugula) and thin seedlings to give them enough room to grow.

This is my baby, a nine-year-old black raspberry bush. They love sun, grow easily, and yield huge--enough for jam by Litha.

I’m a lazy gardener. There are loads of things I could be doing to maximize yield, but life gest busy and things like side-dressing tend to fall off my radar. While I love growing my own food, gardening is more about connecting with nature for me than growing the most tomatoes I possibly can.  

We live on a well-utilized tenth of an acre in the city, so we plant every free space we can find. Still, we manage to feed ourselves for a good chunk of the year. Above is a peek at where our garden stands this week, and I plant to keep updating as the season progresses.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be thinning out rows like the beets shown in the slides above. Basically, that just mean that I’ll pull enough seedlings to give the ones I leave room to fully grow. It took me a few years to get used to the idea of pulling things I just planted, but I’ve definitely seen the benefit.

We also still have a few rows yet to plant. We’re staggering planting dates things like green beans, beets, and spinach so that we don’t just wind up eating nothing but spinach for two weeks. That’s how it’s worked in past years, so we’re hoping to actually enjoy the food a little bit more this year thanks to stagger-planting.

I’ll also be protecting against pests—things like slugs eating our strawberries (organic slug bait), our groundhog eating greens (covering the beds with flexible fencing), or squirrels digging up seedlings as they search for long-ago buried nuts (good luck stopping squirrels).  And, of course, I’ll be weeding, watering, and hanging out on the patio, enjoying it all.