The Garden, history

I have planted tomatoes and a few other things on and off for the past 1o to 15 years but the summer of 2004 I decided to study gardening, particularly vegetable gardening. I figured that I any good I could grow we would not have to buy and with Ichi going to college fulltime this year money would be tight.

I started and continue with books in the Library. I have read too many gardening books to count. Favorites are The Four Season Harvest, Lasagna Gardening, Great Garden Companions, The Self-Sufficient Suburban Garden, Gardening Without Work, Weedless Gardening to name a few.

My garden in the summer of 2004 consisted of four 4'X4' squares and one 2 1/2'X5' strip. Three of the squares had been laboriously dug the previous year and the last square and the strip created each in a few hours using the Lasagna Gardening methods. In these I planted tomatoes, cucumbers, shallots, banana peppers, beans- bush and pole, basil, marigolds, carrots, eggplant, parsley, shasta dasies, zuchinni, sunflowers, watermelon, petunas and bunching onion. We ate tomatoes, cucumbers, banana peppers and beans most of the summer, had all the basil I could want. The zuchinni succum to vine borers and the watermelon produced only two small ones. But most everything produced at least little and the kids(I gave San and Go each a spot where they could decide what to plant, Shi has his spot in heaven) enjoyed their spots and so did I.

The following fall I attempted a winter garden but started everything much too late and harvested only some mesculin mix but learned a lot.

The more I read the more convinced I become that organic methods are the least expensive and produce the nutritionally best produce.