Finally A Veggie Patch…Sort Of

Well it’s taken us nearly six months from building the veggie box to planting some seedlings, but we’ve finally done it! Green thumb here I come.

On the weekend we planted silver beet, lettuce and some parsley in the container on the side. There are also some garlic chives from last year at the front. We have some herbs growing from last year, and we’ll be getting a few more (for some reason I always kill the unkillable rosemary). We’re not going to be self sufficient anytime soon, but we have a few things to supplement our grocery shopping.

The box was built by my woodworking hubby with fence palings and a couple of stakes cut to size and cost about $20. The seedlings were $2.20 each for a punnet of six. The soil we dug up from the dirt mound that is our backyard and added some compost. Our soil is pretty sandy, but there was a lot of compost from the trees around, and there were plenty of worms and that can only be a good thing.

We planted silver beet and lettuce because of the lack of sunlight that we get in our yard.  They can tolerate shade, and prefer not to be in full sun anyway. The sun you see in the photo is about all we get in our yard at this time of the year. The sun has just crept over the fence, the time of the photo is 4pm. During winter (the dry season, where most of the veggie growing is done here) we get absolutely no sun in our yard at all. Our pavers are able to grow a good crop of moss, but despite living in one of the best climates in Australia, we’re not in a good position to grow much else…sigh! In the back section, I might put in a pumpkin vine or two next month, so that they are established before the wet season, when pumpkin plants tend to go mouldy.

Will we save money by growing some veggies? Maybe over time, once the garden is established, and certainly if compared to buying organic vegetables (we’ll be growing organically), but otherwise probably not. Still, it feels good to be growing some of our own produce.

When I was a kid we always had vegetables growing in the backyard. Tomatoes, beans, peas, silver beet, potatoes, pumpkin, zucchini, radishes, carrots, strawberries, rhubarb… There’s something special about going out to pick some beans for dinner, or eating fresh peas straight from the pod, or sun warm strawberries.

Back then “organic” wasn’t something that was mainstream. People didn’t generally buy organic and it didn’t receive mainstream media. But our backyard vegetables were organic. We used chook poo and grass clippings and no pesticides or yuckies, just natural goodness.

While we’re not going to have an awesome, self sufficient garden where we’re living now, I look forward to the time when we have a backyard right for growing. In the meantime, we’re here for a while, so I’m trying to make the most of the space that we have.