Community Gardening

This year I became a gardener!

Apart from the bits of lawn that I dug up this year to plant a few tomato plants, our yard doesn't have a lot of productive dirt. I had been thinking about digging up our whole back yard to plant veggies, but it's so shady back there that the only thing worth planting back there are hostas.

Thank goodness for community gardens! My dear friend Kreesta had planted almost the whole space in this community garden on Maryland Street last year and this year wanted to share the burden/joy with some others. I got a 5 by 20 foot plot to use for my own growing pleasure.

It was a lot of fun to watch everything explode into delicious green yumminess throughout the summer. Certain things produced very well - I had a good month and a half of sugar snap peas and green beans. I probably didn't take very good care of the tomato plants though... They kind of got huge and unruly mid-summer and then a little diseasy by the time they were supposed to be pumping out the fruit. We also got a few small green peppers but strangely enough the plants at home did a lot better.

The cucumbers also started off really strong but eventually got some kind of musty nastiness half way through August that kept them from producing more cukes. I did manage to get enough from these plants for a couple of jars of baby dills, so I can't complain.

I also planted some cantaloupe plants near the back that didn't do too well, apart from the one lovely little melon I picked mid-August.

Tiny but tasty!

This picture kind of shows the risks of community gardening in a poor neighbourhood. I was so proud of my potatoes (you can kind of see them at the back). I had planted fingerlings because I thought it might be nice to have baby size potatoes throughout the growing season.

Unfortunately a few days after I took the picture on the right, I came to the garden to see that all the potato plants in the entire garden had been uprooted. Kreesta had warned me about planting potatoes - along with carrots and corn they're the most popular veggies in the neighbourhood, and you shouldn't expect to harvest everything you grew. I was pretty upset when I first saw them gone - I REALLY love potatoes and I had gotten quite attached to my plants - but them's the breaks. It's easy for me to go and buy baby potatoes at the Farmer's Market if I really want to - but it's probably not much of an option for whoever pulled up my plants.

My Brussels Sprouts on the other hand, have been left entirely for me! I've already picked a few of the biggest ones near the bottom of the stalks, but if this mild autumn continues the way it's been going, I'll be swimming in sprouts for the next few weeks! Yum.