Gardening plans

Me and the lad at the window

First this: Riley consulted his compass this morning, looked at me quite solemnly and declared "It's twenty o'clock". Sometimes the cuteness is nearly more than I can bear.

And regarding gardening, Robbie and I have been trying to figure out how to put in some manner of vegetable garden. Every trip I take to the grocery store gives me sticker shock and the reading I'm doing on the state of food production here in the states makes me want to bow out of the whole process. (If you're curious about how our food is raised or interested in growing anything yourself, you may be interested in the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.

The question is mostly about where to site a garden where it'll receive adequate sun. Our back yard is great, but it's very shady, so we're trying to figure out where else we can grow. We have an offer to use some space at a friends house, but they live nearly an hour away, and all things considered, (drought, gas prices, infinite complications of being in the constant company of a three year old child, etc) that doesn't seem like it'd work well, so we're considering our options here.

We have a good strip of sunny yard that runs parallel to our driveway, and while it's not ideal from an aesthetic sense, it's looking like our best spot, so we think we're going to do a raised bed there. We're not yet decided what to use to contain it though. If we're going to be here for several more years we'd like to use something that'll last a while, but we have concerns about the chemicals in pressure treated lumber leaching into the soil. We still have some research to do, but as of now we're thinking we might use pressure treated landscape timbers and then use some kind of liner to keep the soil away from the wood.

Regardless of where we site it and how we contain the soil, we plan to grow the food organically and use heirloom plants. Hopefully between what we raise here and what we buy at Pepper Place we'll have enough to can and freeze for use after the growing season.

Apparently it is now time to play Candy Land. ;-)