Foodscout Garden: Beyond Organic
For the sake of the planet and for the sake of our health, we’ve been eating as much organic produce as possible for several years, regardless of any cost difference. A few years ago, we began hearing about the “Buy Local” trend, felt that made a lot of sense, and now we do our best to buy produce that’s at least from a nearby state, if not from a local farmer’s market. But never being satisfied with “good enough” we’ve decided to do even better.
After dabbling unsuccessfully with planting a vegetable garden over the last year or so, we finally got serious, got professional help, and are creating a beautiful backyard garden. Linda over at Mountain Rainwater helped us by building 2 raised beds to get us started, bringing in some rich organic soil, and telling us what to plant. If you happen to live in the Asheville, NC area and are looking for help getting your garden started, we highly recommend Mountain Rainwater*.
We planted a little later in the summer than is ideal but we found a few items that should still grow well in our Southern mountain climate. From seed, we planted cucumbers, summer squash, a few okras, chard, and cilantro. Presumably, if nurseries are selling any vegetable starts this time of year, it should be OK to plant these already started vegetables as well. We found some peppers, tomatoes, and a tomatillo plant that Linda gave to us.
It’s now our job to keep the cats out of our garden beds, and our soil watered if there has not been enough rain. Currently, we are using city water from the hose which has tons of chlorine and who-knows-what-else in it. In a future project, we will be adding rain barrels, a solar water pump, and some soaker hoses so that our freshest produce possible will be watered with the cleanest water possible. Stay tuned for that!
It’s been 10 days since we planted and already all of our seeds are sprouting up and our pepper plants are starting to produce little peppers. We can’t wait to be able to eat the absolute freshest produce possible on a regular basis. As we learn about what to plant when, and how to keep our garden thriving, we’ll post that information here to share it with you. And if you have any tips to share, we’d love to hear ‘em!
*We receive absolutely no compensation in any form for recommending Mountain Rainwater. We are just truly happy with the service we received.
3 Comments Posted by Diana | Category: Gardening
Hi there – good to see that you’re growing your own food.
I grow some vegetables and lots of herbs. I always have more herbs than I can use, so I let some of them flower and go to seed, as this helps sustain bee and other insect populations. Native insects need native vegetation to reproduce and this is key for native bird populations.
Also – composting is awesome! Discarding organic waste into landfills and then driving to a nursery to buy compost is a little bit nutty! Maybe it’s also a bit nutty to get as excited as I do about harvesting my own compost, but it really is satisfying. And the earthworms in my compost pile look like small snakes! Visitors marvel at how lush my flower and vegetable garden is – I do think that compost is the secret.
Thanks for the input, Alison! We have actually been composting our produce scraps (which are plentiful) for quite some time. Only now we actually have a use for all this compost we’ve been collecting for 2 years.
We have one of those plastic barrels, and also a worm composting bin that we learned to create at a workshop last year. Only problem is, we’re not entirely sure what to do with the compost once it’s ready. Do we use it after we dig up old plants and before the new ones go in? Do we sprinkle it over the top of the existing garden?
I use compost everywhere. In the spring I add a liberal layer of compost to just about everything in the garden – trees, shrubs, perennials, potted plants, and houseplants coming outside for the summer. When I plant something new – bareroot, rootball, tuber, bulbs, seeds, or six-packs of annuals, I prepare the bed with a mixture of regular soil heavily amended with compost and varying proportions of sand, peat, clay, ash, and other additives depending on what I’m planting. I like the idea of no-till planting, which was a big aha moment for me when I first read about it, so now that most of my garden beds are laid out I don’t dig the soil unless I’m actually planting something that warrants making a big hole. It seems to me that layers of good nutritious compost are pretty close to the process that occurs in natural settings. With the exception of my roses, I rarely fertilize and I have to say, my garden is pretty amazing – nature does a pretty good job if you just let it!