As evidence, we are attempting, in one season, to farm a 600 square foot area. In the past 3 years no more than 150 square feet were tended. Should be interesting!
We have a variety of motivations for this project:
1. We kind of just think it's a good idea to grow your own food, to some extent. It's a skill we want to cultivate.
2. Solidly good, locally grown food, is a chunk of change every week. Ours might turn out more expensive yet, considering the time, but we want to see how a garden balances our grocery budget.
3. I have grown vegetable gardens in every yard of every rental house I've inhabited since 1995. Having a garden to invest in year after year is a dream come true.
My sister keeps a garden blog, which is a great read. She is a much better writer than I am, but she long ago pointed out the value of a photo journal for year-to-year documentation so I'm going to try to copy her. This too is overly-ambitious.
Here's our garden on Saturday, March 12.
The soil was barely thawed. There were a couple clods of ice crystals left in the southeast corner under the spruce tree. Artesian springs popped up all over Boalsburg on Saturday, including 2 inches in our basement (whoops) so the ground is WET. It has never been easier to work it with a shovel.
Doug is working on post holes so we can build a base for the sink (foreground) which has been an uncharacteristic piece of lawn art for three years since he took possession of it from a friend, unwilling to let such a nice piece of countertop go to waste. It will be a great place to rinse dirt off veggies, and a hose splitter mounted on the base will be the irrigation hub.
The little picket fence is our only rabbit protection right now, so it needs to be reinforced. Rabbits are our primary pest. Masha does her best but she's really only a deterrent for groundhogs, which she can mostly keep under control.
At this point the garden has a strawberry patch (~20 plants thanks to my friend Emma) and a garlic patch (~100 heads thanks to my parents help last fall) and that's about it.
I love "over-ambitious!"
ReplyDeleteIn past years, I've kept track of garden produce not by weight (too fussy and time consuming) but by bunches, pints, bouquets, or whatever other unit of measure is easiest and fastest to assess and compare to grocery store prices.