Past Season Recap: Part I

I thought I should give you all a recap of what our garden was like this past summer. In March I started approximately 60 seedlings in our spare bedroom. Most of them made it to be transplanted (huge success in itself). Then in April we started to finish the rooftop patio/garden. This consisted of our deck my husband built, the window we crawl out of to get to it, and a lot of containers ranging from recycling bins, old grease containers and real planters.

Our dog Pepsi was not a fan of jumping in and out of the window as you can tell from the picture. She would wait for us to pick her up and bring her back inside...what a baby!

When we first got started I had some flowers planted, mesclun greens, strawberries, 3 zucchini plants in containers (to the right in the picture), marigolds, blue potatoes, bush beans (in long window boxes), and pickling cucumbers (smaller window box). These were all in containers around the perimeter of the deck.

Then on the back section, my husband Marc had left a 1' wide by 13' long opening in the deck. We sank more recycling bins into it, drilled them to the studs, put holes in the bottoms and filled them up with dirt. This was going to be our "permanent" garden bed.

In the permanent bed we had our Roma tomatoes, sweet peppers, spinach, 3 more pickling cukes in the area closest the house (for shade), basil and some more marigolds (I had heard they kept unwanted bugs away). This rounded out our rooftop garden. I then had the brilliant idea to use our old seltzer bottles as a drip irrigation system to all the plants pots. This was a little time consuming; drilling holes into the caps, cutting off the tops and then burying them, all 20 of them. But I was determined not to waste any water that I would be lugging up to the second floor.

This project, along with our second attempt at a composter and our hand-made rain barrel was done in mid-May. It was then time to wait until the veggies started producing!

Hello Bloggisphere!

Hello out there in the bloggisphere! It is a rainy November day here in New England and I have officially started our Garden Expansion Project! (Which also motivated me to start this blog I have been thinking about.)

Some background of what we are working with: We live in a 2 family victorian right on the main street of our little village, but we only have a front yard. And up until this morning, most of it was used for parking (another thing we don't have much of). This past summer my husband, Marc and I worked on a small garden which consisted of our rooftop patio and some containers on our 2nd floor porch. It produced enough to get us hooked on the idea that we could possibly completely sustain ourselves on what WE grow! Then came the realization that we were going to have to be creative to make it work where we were.

Along those lines, we don't want to move for more land because of our goal to lessen our impact on the earth. In our current location we are able to walk to the bank, grocery store, local co-op, library and farmers market. It is pretty ideal!

Now back to the GEP: I am making 1/2 of our front yard into raised garden beds...to the annoyance of our downstairs tenants. The goal is to have our produce needs met for 4 months out of the year by what we grow ourselves. Our goal is small right now, but hopefully we can do it!

Here is the 1/2 of our yard to be veggified (dimensions roughly 28'x55'):

And here is the same 1/2 of yard with the raised beds mapped out.

It is going to be a slow process over the next week or two, but we have to get the beds in and the soil tilled with manure before snow. The dirt in our yard is more like cement! Hopefully we can get some goodness in there before it snows and it will have all winter to ferment into amazing, plant growing beds.

More to come once I start hand tilling the "cement" and go and pick up some local llama manure! - Kate