Finally!
June 7, 2020
Birthday taken care of and today I finally finished planting my garden. Phew! It's finished later than usual thanks to the lousy weather we had up until recently. So we'll see what grows and what's only half grown or only starting to grow by the time we have our first frost.
Some things are already growing and ready to be harvested, like my chives, shallots, lettuce, rhubarb, mint and my strawberries look like they'll be ready soon. Just hoping I can get to them before the bugs do.
Same with all the other berries we grow. I've got blueberries growing and have had for several years (they're perennials), but have never tasted them as the birds have gotten to them all before we even had one. I've put bird netting around them to try to protect them from the birds, but all that does is get tangled in the lawn mower or whipper snipper at the most and at the least does nothing to prevent the disappearance of the ripe berries. So I don't know....
Anyhow this year I have planted a ton of corn, asparagus, cantalope, spinach, peppers, coriander, brussels sprouts, kale, mustard, carrots, beets, radicchio, 3 kinds of lettuce, onions, shallots, chives, basil, curry, parsnip, arugula, rosemary, dill, strawberries, grapes, eggplant, okra, winter spinach, tomatoes, cabbage, cauliflower, zucchini, cucumbers, peas, beans, raspberries, rhubarb, blueberries, another kind of berries (hybrid), blackberries and gogi berries (if the plant is salvagable). So we'll see what we get out of it in the end of the growing season. If it lasts long enough to grow some of the slower growing plants or not.
For those wishing to grow some of their own food, I've found a few resources to help out in the advice, how-to & knowledge side of things for beginning and even experienced gardeners.
Enjoy a longer veggie-growing season with raised bed gardens It also talks about weed & pest control as well.
How to grow lavender I tried growing this for a couple of years but wasn't very successful at it. But then I didn't have this article to refer to either, so maybe if I did, things would've turned out differently. Who knows?
Vegetable Container Gardening: 2 Books in 1 PDF books downloadable at the longfile's link. Perfect for those who don't have a yard to plant a garden and maybe only a balcony on which to grow something. These books should explain how and which vegetables are suitable for container gardening.
Faites pousser vos noyaux et pepins ! [French] This is an epub and downloadable at the novafiles link.
Des legumes en hiver: Produire en abondance, meme sous la neige [French] Another epub downloadable at the novafiles link, which I would love to see which vegetables can be grown underneath snow.... Anyhow, that would definitely be interesting to know.
And here's an excellent reason to grow your own food if you can: Food pantries dry up as unemployment skyrockets Considering as one of the French books above points out you probably eat a lot of fruit and vegetables that have seeds in them already, which you could save and plant - ergo free food when/if it grows. Or a packet of seeds can be had for as little as 33 cents at the dollar store or maybe up to $3 or $4 for fancier seeds at other places. But very often one seed is all it takes for several of it's kind to grow. In other words a tomato plant doesn't yield just one tomato usually (unless there's something wrong with the plant or it's not watered often enough), but you can usually get quite a few per plant and you get several seeds in a packet (for any kind of veggie). You can't even buy a single cauliflower at the grocery store for the price of a whole packet full of cauliflower seeds. So growing your food is definitely the cheapest and safest way to go (that way you know precisely how it was grown and which chemicals if any were used on them or not as you grew it yourself). Even if you only get enough to cover your costs versus what it would cost you to buy in a grocery store, you didn't lose anything.
But I can guarantee you you'll get way more than that out of it (unless it's your first year and you have to buy your garden soil and have to kit yourself out with tillers and tools and compost bins and the like - then no it may take a couple of years before you recuperate those costs). But unless you plan on having a permanent vegetable garden year after year I wouldn't worry about all of that. You could maybe hire someone to till a small patch of ground in your yard for your garden (even if you use the weed matting you still need bare soil to plant in) and then after that Dollar store implements might do you. I bought a small hand shovel only about 1 foot (30cms) long from tip of shovel to top of handle that I've been using in my gardens since I started gardening back in 2010. I bought that shovel and it's predecessor (the one before) at the dollar store and those 2 shovels are pretty much all I've used as my gardening tools.
