Tuesday 11 December 2012

The Garden Patch

In this series of posts, I will chronicle my attempts to convert a stretch of decorative landscaping into a kitchen garden.  At my home in South Western Ontario, there was over a hundred feet of flower beds already planted with flowering shrubs when we moved in.  For the purposes of this experiment, I plan to pull the shrubs out of one stretch of it and turn it into a vegetable-and-fruit-bearing garden. 
The vegetables my family most commonly purchases at grocery stores are carrots, lettuce, onions, celery, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, green beens, asparagus, and corn.  I plan to plant seeds for some of these vegetables in my newly converted flower bed.  I then plan to weigh the amount of produce I am able to harvest and price the comparable weight at the grocery store.  I intend to come up with a dollar value to every vegetable I grow and keep a running tally of the total savings to my grocery bill.
I will do the same with fruit.  In the past year, I have planted three blueberry bushes, two blackberry bushes, two everbearing strawberry plants, and by some stroke of luck, four wild brambles sprang up in my garden that I hope might be wild raspberry. (If they turn out not to be I'm going to have a bitch of a time getting them out.)  I also planted two cherry trees, two peach trees, and a pear tree.
The photo shows the area of flower bed I'm working on converting.  As you can see, the second shrub hasn't come out yet, but I'm not giving up.  Once I get that one out, I plan to compost directly in those holes over  the winter and then work up the soil in the spring to plant my garden.

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