Experiments in Urban Agriculture

Inspired by another unschooler's blog (Blue Skies Urban Farm), I'm going to try and document a lot of our adventures with growing our own food this summer. Previously, we've dabbled in fairly standard backyard vegetable gardening - a few tomato plants, peppers, and zucchini, with some herbs thrown in for good measure. I've been wanting to branch out a bit more for a few years, but the last few growing seasons have been crazy-busy for us, and it just hasn't happened!

This year, I found a copy of Small Space, Big Harvest by Duane Newcomb at the library and was instantly intrigued. Using his methods, the author claims you can grow more than 200 lb of produce in a 5' x 5' plot. Since space is definitely at a premium around here, I quickly dove into the book and started making some fairly ambitious plans.

We have 1 raised bed that's roughly 8' x 8', plus another long, skinny strip I've divided up into 3 sections, roughly 4' x 4'.

This is half of our 8'x8' raised bed (that's garlic chives starting to shoot up there in the bottom left corner)

This is one of our smaller 4'x4' ish beds.

The soil doesn't look great because I hadn't turned any compost or topsoil into it yet!

I also decided to try my hand at starting a few seedlings this year, which is something I've never done before.

I took this photo a couple of weeks ago, when the sunflower seedlings were just starting to come up. I've also got scarlet runner beans (which have gotten huge and really need to go in the garden ASAP!), zucchini, cabbage, thyme, oregano, and some morning glory and sweet peas growing away.

The last frost date here is May 20th, so any day now I will be heading to the nursery to get the rest of my vegetable plants! We are also going to try some strawberries and blueberries along with the vegetables, as well as a variety of herbs. The thing that attracts me most to the Small Space method is that you interplant everything close together in the beds, rather than growing rows of individual vegetables. It maximizes the space, and it looks a lot more eye-catching too!

Since it's the beginning of the growing season, my enthusiasm is high. The trick will be to keep up with the garden maintenance once I get it all planted!