Sunday, April 26, 2009

Our garden –Year 2 : The first days of work…

I hope you all will humor me; this will be a life blogging moment instead of one of my usual tips and ideas ones.

The temperature in Quebec City jumped 18 degrees Celsius this week-end and we went from early spring to “feels like summer” weather! So my husband decided that this was it! We were starting the gardening season. Of course, we meant prep work (we will still be getting nights of frost until the end of May) but we worked hard, making our garden plots ready for planting.

On Saturday, we went to my parents for dinner and my dad and husband diligently worked on our new composter. We went all around the home improvement stores and all we could find, in our price range, were plastic compost bins. Now, with trying to create a greener life for ourselves, as much as I understand the durability of the plastic bin, we just could not get ourselves to buy one. So with the price of the pre-made wooden bins, we decided to use all recycled natural pin wood we had here from an old bonsai growing shelf we had built and voilà! It turned out wonderfully.

By the way… Making a compost bin is super easy! Just make sure that you always use untreated-unpainted-unvarnished wood! Any treatment on wood will contaminate the actual compost!

Now today was the really hard job! We only had a 10 X 12 ft. plot at our community garden last year and were able to square away a 10 X 24 extra one this year! But the people that had it before us did not tend to it very well last year so we knew we had a day ahead of us. But as you can see it all went wonderfully.

Our goal is to be at least 75% self sufficient for vegetables this summer. Here is a list of what we will be planting :

  • Tomatoes (7 different varieties)
  • Cucumbers (3 different varieties)
  • Onions
  • Shallots
  • Peas (3 different varieties)
  • Beans (3 different varieties)
  • Collard greens
  • Lettuce
  • Spinach
  • Brussels sprouts
  • Zucchinis
  • Herbs
  • Asparagus (which we will not be able to eat until next year unfortunately)


For the rest of our veggie needs, the organic farmers market will open here in just 2 months and all will be well.

I hope all of you had a wonderful week-end!

What veggies, fruits and plants are you growing this year?

1 comments:

Up The Garden Path said...

Well done with the compost bin - but you'll be needing another one soon! We have three plus two manure piles (from the farm next door) and last weekend I found myself wondering where we could put another one! Good luck with the veg. So rewarding eating your own home grown veg.