Since finding my passion for food systems, I’ve wanted a garden. For the past 7 years, I’ve moved every 6ish months (house, city, province, country, continent, you name it), which turns out to not lend itself well to gardening. I’m now in a rental and am slated to move out in August, but I decided that this was my year to go for it. According to the neighbours, the yard hadn’t been touched since ‘06, and you can tell – bluebells, blackberries, and lilacs had taken over. I chose the sunniest spot in the yard for my garden and spent around a week preparing my bed. I tore out landscape fabric and double dug to remove tree roots that inhibited planting. I didn’t want to till as it’s not great for soil health (more on no-till later), but so be it!
When I asked my friend/garden guru Louise Kelaher of Yard to Plate for advice on what to grow, she answered my question with a question: what do you want to eat? I came up with 7 veggies: carrots, radishes, broccoli, spinach, arugula, zucchini, and peas. Though my intentions were noble, somewhere along the way things got out of hand. In addition to those 7, I acquired a lettuce mix, garlic, pumpkin, two kinds of blueberry bushes, spearmint, peppermint, English thyme, chives, parsley, oregano, rosemary, sage, butter lettuce, scallions, wild bergamot, borage, pansies, sweetpeas, marigolds, calendula, nasturtiums, and basil four ways (sweet, holy, sweet Thai, and Siam Queen). Some of it isn’t my fault. The butter lettuce and scallions were begging to be replanted after we bought and ate them (seems a little masochistic but who am I to judge). My sweet elderly plant fairy of a neighbour has been a huge enabler, ditching growable things on my doorstep (the garlic, chives, parsley, and oregano are all on her). So really it’s only the rest that I can take the blame for. I’ve had to bust out another garden bed where the blackberry bushes were, which I left untilled (bed prep was still painful, but this time not as much of a lactic acid hoeing-my-patootie-off way and more of a thorn in my thumb way). I’ve also colonised most of the deck, where, frankly, we won’t be entertaining anyway (though I have been serenading my plants who listen in rapt silence).
