Small space gardening
I don’t have a green thumb. I hate yard work. It’s inescapable, however, so I figured that I might as well try to make our yard as productive as possible this year, especially when I’m trying to eat better and feed the family more cheaply. I’m not Farmer Penny and while we have a city yard of decent size, I didn’t want it consumed with my gardening experiments; the scale had to be small and contained.
This is what I did. First of all, I made a list of the vegetables and fruit that my family likes, can be grown in our area, and are relatively low glycemic. I researched how much space, sunlight, and care each plant would need. I considered sun and water in our yard throughout the spring and summer. In the end, I decided to try my hand at lettuce, spinach, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, sugar snap peas, green beans, carrots, yellow and green bell peppers, apples, peaches, and some herbs. I wanted to add blueberry and raspberry bushes, but that was too much to take on this year.
Fruit: We picked a spot on the sunny side of our house and planted two semi-dwarf apple trees and a dwarf peach. The apples need each other to pollinate; the peach is a self-pollinator but won’t produce as well. With a family of three, in good years those should provide us more than enough fruit to eat, can/freeze, and share. I also scattered strawberry plants around in pots, window boxes, a hanging basket, and a flower bed. Those have been my most marked failure: only two plants have survived, and they both look pathetic. I’ll be buying berries this year.
Vegetables: The side of our detached garage is bathed in sunlight more than eight hours a day. However, the soil there was rocky and there is a lot of walking traffic between the sidewalk and the garage door. The solution was a raised bed and lattice that I designed and my handy husband constructed; it’s about a foot tall, a foot and a half deep, and over fifteen feet long. We used a found ladder to give some interest to the bed (and I hope to encourage the peas and beans to grow up onto it). I painted it white and we filled it with top soil and compost.
This bed has been very successful so far. The plants are growing well and I can walk by, pluck a few weed seedlings before they take over, pour in some water from our rain barrels, and I’m done. It’s extremely low maintenance. When the seeds were first sprouting, I sprayed them frequently with Deer Off! to dissuade the rabbits and squirrels, but I haven’t noticed any munching yet. We’ll see how things go when it’s harvest time.
Greens: I wanted lettuce and spinach closer to the house and safely out of the reach of rabbits, who threatened to destroy our tulips this year. I started seedlings indoors and then transplanted them into four 36″ window boxes and four 8″ pots (nine plants per box, four plants per pot). The window boxes were hung on the rails of an upstairs porch that gets sun from early morning until about 2:00 pm. I put the pots on a ledge outside our front porch, where they get sun off and on throughout the day. For the first couple of weeks, this allowed me to bring the seedlings in at night when a frost was predicted.
These have been a roaring success. I haven’t had to thin the plants, as I expected to, and this week I’ve been cutting fresh leaves every other day. Last night we all had salads from our garden and there was more than enough for me to harvest spinach to saute with eggs for my breakfast. Maintenance couldn’t be easier: with the plants off the ground, there have only been a couple of weeds and no intrusive pests. I water them frequently and use a nitrogen-rich fertilizer to encourage leaf growth.
We’ll see how long I can keep the greens producing and if the harvest from the raised bed is as good as I expect it to be. Cost-wise, it will take a couple of productive years for the containers to pay for themselves, but they’re already giving us fresher, tastier food. Over the summer I’ll figure out if I need to make any tweaks to the plan next year (I already know that I’ll buy our 2009 strawberries as grown plants rather than dormant ones).
