Last year when I started staying home full time, one of the projects I decided to tackle was gardening. I have never been very enthusiastic about yard work. (My parents would call that a major understatement.) But when we bought our house, Hubby T and I decided that we wanted to do at least enough to make our yard look presentable. Our front flower bed did pretty well last summer so this spring I am going to take the plunge and try vegetables in the back!
For Christmas I asked for gardening supplies and was deluged by my family with gardening gloves, trowels, kneeling pads, and a great frame for my above the ground vegetable patch. Part of my other motivation in planting this garden is to cover up some of the dead space in our backyard, which won't even grow weeds, so the frame was a necessity. I'm hoping the roots of my veggies won't need to grow much deeper than the depth of the frame, otherwise I'm doomed!
To provide me with some inspiration, I also asked for the book The Quarter-Acre Farm: How I Kept the Patio, Lost the Lawn, and Fed My Family for A Year by Spring Warren. The title pretty much sums up the book, it's the story of a northern California woman who turned her yard into a small farm and fed her family with her crops. The biggest take away I got from the book is that there is a big difference between a farm and a garden, and I am definitely waaay less ambitious than this author. This woman creates her own dirt; did you know that rabbit manure is an important part of homemade soil? Yea, that won't be happening in my yard. She created several different irrigation systems to try and water her different beds exactly the right amount. I'm pretty sure one watering can will be good enough for me. In an attempt to take advantage of every possible source of food from her farm, she even captured the snails in her garden, prepared them for human consumption, and ate them (with copious amounts of wine). I don't think words can express how much I will never have a desire to do that. I'll spare you the details of how the snails were prepared for eating, it's completely disgusting.
So what did I learn from this woman's farming experiment? Good soil matters. Planting at the right time of year matters. Bugs can be your friend, or they can be your greatest enemy. I also have a lot of research to do. My goal is to set up the frame in February, start looking for bagged soil sales, and be ready to plant in late March/early April (assuming that's the right time to plant what I want to plant). And what do I plan to plant? Well, that's a good question, which I also need to research! Maybe I should post this and get working!
If you have any suggestions for growing vegetables and herbs in the mid-Atlantic, please send them my way. Hopefully this whole project won't be a big bust. We'll know in a few months!
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