Picture taken right after the initial planting. I used some seedlings: tomatoes, peppers, herbs, chives and flowers. Flowers! Yes, I planted marigolds and nasturtium to keep away the bugs and add colour to the garden. Nasturtium flowers are also edible and added a nice peppery flavour to my salads. I also planted beans, carrots, swiss chard and lettuce from seed.
I put a cage structure at the back to eventually support my bean plants. Over the seeds that had not yet sprouted I laid a square of cardboard to help keep the soil moist and prevent any birds from taking off with my seeds.
I love this picture! I took it low down right next to the garden so you can see the baby lettuce sprouting and the little tags I used for identifying my crops. Those tags are expensive in a garden centre but you can pick them up cheap at any dollarama. Of course I knew what my crops were but really liked the look of it and it was nice for any visitors to my garden to be able to identify the various vegetables.
Shortly after I planted my second crops of carrots and beans. Second and third seedings ensure everything isn't harvestable at the same time and gives you fresh veggies for a longer period.
View from the other side with my pots of petunias in the foreground.
Tomatoes! They thrived in the SFG! Tomatoes are heavy feeders and I wasn't sure how they'd do without fertilizer but based on the huge crop I harvested I don't think anyone could say I didn't have a bumper crop!
Jalapeno peppers. I didn't get a great yield on the peppers which I attribute to the very short growing season in Calgary In the future I'd make sure I use cloches for as long as possible when the plants were seedlings. I'd also consider buying more developed seedling in the future.
Crops are maturing.
Beautiful carrots fresh from the dirt. The added advantage to using Mel's Mix is how easy it comes off root vegetables. With only 16 carrots per square though I will defenitely be planting more square in the future!
|Yellow Beans. I love fresh beans steamed with butter. Unfortunately this year was not a good one for beans. I had to re-seed after the first seeding produced a single plant. Apparently I was not the exception though. I think it was just a bad year for beans all around the province.
My harvested tomatoes. This is what I got off my 4 tomato plants. Of the 4 varieties I planted (Sub Artic Maxi, Oregon Spring, Early Girl and Roma) I like the yield and fruit best from the Early Girl and the Roma.
End of season after the first frost. Just lettuce, chives and marigold left after the clean up. I still had fresh lettuce for a few weeks as it's very frost tolerant. It was slightly more bitter but we enjoyed it all the same.
|End of season. At this end of the SFG all that remained was swiss chard and marigolds.
I made salsa and crushed tomatoes with my ripened tomatoes.
So that's how things went last year. This year I've decided to double my carrots and beans planting and skip the peppers. The planting is done and in my next blog I'll share with you the construction and planting of the new SFG boxes.
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