FarmCity Food Garden Construction

Front Yard Garden - Update

We wrote a while ago about a beautiful front yard vegetable garden we built; here are new photos showing the garden about a month later - in very early May.  We've built some climbing frames for peas and beans, transplanted strawberries, garlic and rhubarb, and (with the owners) have helped plant bok choi, pak choi, turnips, carrots, beets, lettuce, potatoes, and some herbs.  The orange thyme between the flagstones is growing well, and will eventually form one continuous seam of aromatic beauty amongst the stones!

There's still room for the heat-loving plants to go in - tomatoes, squashes, peppers, more herbs, and so on.   And of course, the greens and peas can be resewn in successive "flights" - every three or four weeks - to keep a steady supply coming for much of the summer.  

In the fall, while the last tomatoes are still ripening on the vine, the garden can be converted into a winter garden - broccoli, cabbages, cauliflower and brussels sprouts interspersed with beds of kale, garlic, onions and so on.  We can also cover one or more of the beds, and grow lettuce for year-round harvesting!

Year-Round Harvesting in Vancouver

Fresh lettuce in January - thanks to our row coverings!  Using the technique outlined in an earlier post about covered beds - using rebar, PVC pipe and plastic sheeting to make mini-greenhouses - we have been expanding our winter gardening ideas, and are now harvesting sweet, succulent lettuce in the middle of winter!  

Reading this mid-winter, you might look out at the pouring rain, and think, "No way I'll garden in the winter!"  But it's actually easier than in the summer!  Weed, prepare, and seed the beds in late August (earlier for the broccoli and other brassicas), and build the row covers.  In the first few weeks we watered a little, using a drip hose - but once the fall rains come, the ground gets so saturated, you don't even have to water all winter!  

Here's one covered bed, shown in late December, with various lettuces and other greens:

We've also been able to harvest sprouting broccoli (in the foreground) and kale throughout the winter - rather than only in early spring.  And out in the uncovered garden, our cabbages are overwintering as usual. 

I'm also throwing in a photo of our covered garden last August.  We built a super-sized cover (really, an ad hoc greenhouse) over some of our tomatoes, to protect them from the blight.  The greenhouse spanned two 5-foot wide garden beds with a path between - and was high enough to stand up in.  We left the ends open so it wouldn't get too hot or humid in there, but even so, the added heat really sped up the tomato ripening.  Lazy about weeding, we also grew an extraordinary crop of chickweed beneath the tomato plants.   We fed it to the chickens, of course!

Winter Warnings!

They say it's going to be a hard winter this year, what with La Nina and so on.  So we've been planning how to help our winter plants to make it safely through the cold months.  Above all, we're concerned to cover them - both against frost and snow - so we've devised an easy DIY solution for covering whole garden beds.

The photo shows our kale and cabbage plants under a framework of PVC piping and rebar. We'll cover the frame with floating row cover - a white fabric that lets in light, but that hopefully will keep the plants just those few degrees warmer to make the difference between freezing and survival.

We cut the rebar to 2-foot lengths (or if you don't have a saw, you can buy it already cut, in some stores), then sink them into the ground on opposite sides of the bed - leaving about about 8 inches of rebar aboveground.  Then we test out the length that the PVC pipe (3/4" internal diameter) needs to be to fit over the rebar - and cut it to the correct length (any saw will cut the pipe, so you should be able to do this part yourself!).  Then settle the piping over the rebar, to form the arches.  

Because we are concerned about snow as well as frost, we also decided to tie a pole along the length of the bed, from arch to arch at the height of the arches - to keep the fabric from collapsing on the plants should it eventually snow.  

 Who knows whether we'll need it this winter!? 

Above: One of our cabbages as of October 15th. 

It's Almost August, and There's Plenty of Time to Start Your Garden!

Here it is, getting on in the summer, and you just never found the time to find a free patch of dirt and start your new veggie garden as you always meant to!  But never fear, August is still planting time - and there's lots you can grow!  

Okay, it's too late to grow tomatoes or start corn, but there's still time to grow a crop of turnips, scallions, radishes, lettuces, and all kind of greens: endive, kale, collards, spinach and chard.  In the heat of the summer, most of these should be planted in partial shade - they'll go to seed in full sun.  The lettuce and the radishes, you should be able to plant in successive plantings a few weeks apart, and get several rounds of crops off before the summer comes to a close.

Plus, now's the time to start a seed bed of your winter crops - kale, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, and onions.  You start them all from seed in one small area, then as the rest of your garden peters out in the fall, transplant the winter seedlings to the rest of your garden.   

From then on, they'll grow for another 6-8 weeks, depending on the weather, then basically go dormant through into late January or so.  Then, in February-March, you can start eating fresh food from your garden again!  We really do get a good nine months plus of garden food in a year!

You can also consider what perennials you want in your garden - raspberries, blueberry bushes, currants, and so on, and plan to plant them in the fall.  

Winter Beauty - Cabbage, Broccoli and Radishes

Last night's heavy frost is just the thing for these winter broccoli: it's the cold that makes them so sweet-tasting come the spring!   

 

We planted these broccoli from seed in July, then transplanted them from the seed bed to this bed when they were about 4 inches tall - near the end of August.  They're dormant now, but will start growing again in February, and be ready to eat in March.  

The cabbage below is ready to eat - we're just storing it "on the vine" until we need it!  The seed was sown outdoors in early May. 

These radishes, we planted in late August, and we're harvesting them now.