Monday, December 31, 2007

Welcome

This blog is here to help us document our garden. We've had three years of growing experience on our property with nothing more to show than our health and a few random pictures. Our intent here is two-fold; first to give us an archive of our garden which will allow us to plan a new season and to hopefully inspire others to do as we've done.

Our property is a small lot which we've divided up into a few different fruit and vegetable plots. In this first post we want to provide an overview of our garden. We have three main plots. The first is about 20 feet by 7 feet and the second about 10 feet by 12 feet. These comprise virtually our entire back yard. The first one used to be about 15' long, but last year we shortened our parking area in order to have more growing space. Our car is very small. Here is a picture of the backyard. It doesn't show where we grow strawberries, raspberries and hops, nor all of the herb bed, but you get the idea.

All of our beds are currently covered with a layer of alfalfa mulch, though you can see that we still have harvestable veggies. We have leeks that we are slowly eating, parsnips and beets as well. Also, we have kale, fennel, more parsnips and some purple broccoli that will be ready to eat shortly after it starts warming up.

You can also see a small corner of part of our composting system, we'll write a post on that at some point.

The third plot is currently only for garlic. It's in our front yard so we wanted to use the space for something that has a long growing season and doesn't need much attention. This plot is about 4 feet by 8 feet. Last year was the first year we harvested garlic from it, we got around 150 cloves from it. We planted quite a few of those again back in the middle of October but we still have a lot of garlic left. Enough probably to last us until we harvest these in July.

This bed is also mulched with alfalfa, but we also used the fabric mulch because the neighbours cat would otherwise dig in this plot.

So, that's basically our garden. In the future we will post on planting, sowing, harvesting or anything else that occurs to us. Maybe just a nice picture ... here's one of our leeks.

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