When I was a kid my family lived in the country and I can remember our garden being quite large with all your standard garden fare; carrots, tomatoes, squash, zucchini, lettuce, beans, radish, pumpkins, etc and to top it off a few sunflower plants at the end. It was fairly successful and the pleasant thoughts of the past picking our own vegetables has led me to grow our own garden over the past couple of years.

In 2006 I attempted our first garden with some very basic knowledge of gardening from my father’s garden and watching sow, transplant, fertilize and harvest the fruits of his labor. Our home is located inside the city limits on our grand sprawl of, at best 0.33 acres, leaves little room for rows and rows of vegetable plants. With so little land we turned to the idea of square foot gardening. I cannot remember how I found out about this type of gardening, but it is perfect for small areas and has served us well based on size from the start. The first year was filled with wonderful success, large green plants, new budding flowers/fruit, and my heart was full of accomplishment. Before long though that accomplishment turned to utter dismay, my beautiful plants became diseased, my fruit was rotting and falling off the stems, production and subsequently my harvest was minimal. Where did I go wrong? Could it be the ~6 hours of sunlight in the backyard where I first planted? The lack of pollination from some weird fatal disease killing the bees? Did I have a black thumb? I don’t know and I was determined to try again the over following years.

Year after year my successes improved and I learned what I could and could not grow in our backyard. Last year I put a small box at the side of our home and planted tomatoes, spinach, onion and broccoli as it receives the full amount of the sun all day. The tomatoes were huge and plentiful. The harvest was the same size as the past two years in the backyard combined. The onions stunk, not literally, they just didn’t grow. Broccoli succumbed to an early death by my hand as the plant was enormous without a head on it. Spinach did ok under the sun, but it became warm so it bolted to seed.

I plan to do regular updates of how everything is going so that you can see the progress.

Thinking of starting a garden? Do you have a garden? How big and what do you grow?