Adventures in Urban Gardening

I have a new hobby: Gardening.

In the city, you ask? Why, yes. My friend K and I are working a 10 x 10 plot in a local community garden.

It’s been a lot of work getting it started. K's husband built us a raised bed with untreated lumber. Then we filled it with a mix of compost, soil, and peat moss.

Next, I planned a square foot garden. It looks something like this:

W

oregano	Thyme	Basil	basil	Pepper (1)	Pepper (1)	Bush beans	Bush beans	Cuke 2
thyme	oregano	Basil	Pepper	Pepper (1)	Pepper (1)	Bush Beans	Bush Beans	Cuke 2
			pepper	pepper	pepper	Bush beans	Bush beans	Tomato
Red beets (16)	Red beets (16)	Red beets (16)				Bush beans	Bush beans	Tomato
Yellow Beets (16)	Yellow beets (16)	Yellow beets (16)				Bush beans (wax)	Bush beans (wax)	Tomato
Onions (16)	Onions (16)	okra						Tomato
Okra	okra	okra				melon		Tomato
	Zuke (1)							Tomato
								Tomato

I ordered most of my seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds:

• Contender (Buff Valentine) bush beans
• Detroit Dark Red beets
• Golden beets
• Black Diamond cukes
• Minnesota midget muskmelon
• Golden zucchini
• okra
• some kind of wax beans
  

I also ordered plants from the Natural Gardening Company:

• Tomatoes: Stupice, Sun Sugar cherry, Pruden’s Purple, San Marzano, Zapotec, Dona, and Brandywine
• Sweet Peppers: Purple Beauty, Corno Di Toro, Ace, and Golden Summer
• Thyme, basil, and oregano

K also scattered some nasturtium seeds along the path.

The garden layout has been a work in progress. My first error was simply one of stupidity--I didn't follow my map and planted seeds with my garden plan facing west instead of north. This wouldn’t have mattered except the square foot gardening method uses vertical climbs for tomatoes and cukes. Having those vertical climbs on the west side of the garden rather than the north side would have meant that my vertically growing plants would cast shade over their neighbors. So when it came time to plant the tomatoes, I had to pull out some bean sprouts to make room for them.

My next major mistake was instructing K to put the okra between the onions and the zucchini. I thought we had more space there. As you can see above, the okra is too close to the zucchini plant. Once the seeds sprout, we will move the seedlings to the empty squares above the beets.

Where the okra is now, we had planted lettuce seeds. These were a big bust--we only got a few lettuce sprouts, and those refused to grow. I don't know if we planted too late or if our seeds weren't good or what. Luckily, our community garden friend, D, has a bumper crop of lettuces, and she has generously shared her bounty with us.

Our onions have not done very well--they are limping along. This is a mystery, because D gave us these seedlings, and their brethren and sistren are now absolutely thriving in D's garden. But most everything else looks great. And we should have our first harvest in a few weeks: green beans and beets.

K and I take turns watering the garden. It's been so dry that it needs watering every day. I absolutely love doing this. It is so pleasant being there in the evening, just before sunset. I spend a lot of time just standing there, admiring the plants and dreaming of fresh vegies.

We still have a fair bit of work to do. We have to install a vertical climb for the tomatoes and cukes, and we have to move the okra, as I mentioned. We also will need cages for the peppers. Every 2 weeks I've been planting a few new squares of beans, and we'll continue this throught the summer so as to have a continuous harvest of beans. After we harvest the beets (which I should have staggered a la the beans, but I didn't think to do it when I planted them), we will need to plant something in those squares. We could do more beets, staggered this time, and we may use some squares for a few more beans.

I don't know how much, if any, grocery money this will save. Renting the plot costs me $50/year, and K bought the supplies to make the box and stones for the path, and I bought most of the plants and seeds and the vertical climb materials, and we will need to get pepper cages. (Of course, some of those expenses will be one-time costs.) All in all, the author of the book The $64 Tomato may have it right. But I don't care--I have discovered that I am a gardening geek.