I didn't realize how much I need some kind of garden in my life until a few rentals in when building a garden was slightly out of the question.
But let's start back in our first rental. When Chad and I first started living together I moved in to his tiny attic apartment in Waterloo, ON. This was an attic of a detached home with a yard in a historic district of the city. Naturally all of our neighbours were minimum 40 years older then us and kept their yards immaculate. And we were not about to be the obvious renters with the ugly yard. I had dreams of galvanized pales brimming with lavender, calendula, and chrysanthemums sitting around a couple of aderondak chairs on our backyard porch. While some things (like this scene I just painted for everyone) didn't quite work out, here's what did.
We laid out our first garden and I read a lot from a book called The Urban Farm. This book was one of the easiest resource books to read cover to cover. The author covers so many ways to fit a full (and I mean full) garden into a very tiny space. She also talks at length about creating community co-ops for buying local/organic wholesale, and breaks the book up by season. I learned so much from this book.
I honestly expected nothing with this first garden. I didn't know what the climate would do, I knew that some thing should grow pretty easily. But I was shocked to see that every vegetable we grew came up in fair abundance. This included zucchini's, 3 types of lettuce, onions, garlic, bush and pole beans, snow peas, spinach, swiss chard, tomatoes, peppers (regular and hot), egg plant, carrots, beets, broccoli, and butternut squash. We also learned a lot about certain diseases like blight and what to do about that.
The gardening picked up again when we moved to northern BC although it was initially dismal. We were renting a home that our friends owned and they were away for only 6 months. So we weren't able to plant a full blown garden and had to focus on container gardening. I do really love container gardening, but as long as its purposeful to whatever I need. As in, I don't love container gardening exclusively. But that's what we had to do.
What we also learned was that because Kitimat is on the north pacific coast, the temperate climate and mild temperatures make it difficult to grow high yields. Also, the sun comes about around 4 am and sets around 11am. So most plants end up going to seed very early in the season before they produce fruit.
The last 2 seasons we've been living in our current home that we rent, the gardening has been much better. The home owners were avid gardeners so they left raised beds for us. We also have a small sort of greenhouse which has been lovely for transplanting and seedlings. Again, I have been trying everything and anything when it comes to the garden. I have such a curiosity to see what will grow and then have been trying in the following season to do research on the individual plants to give them a bit of a boost. It still has been a huge struggle with some things (like sunflowers oddly enough) growing really well and others (like tomatoes) not growing at all.
Our hope for the future is to have lots of space (acres) to expand our gardening to a small fruit orchard, bee keeping, maybe some animal husbandry, and really spend time learning about how plants grow where and when. There is always endless learning and lots of time to see how our needs may change our gardening habits. Updates to come!
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