The Garden Begins!

Last weekend, we celebrated the unseasonably warm weather by starting work on our garden. I've pretty much given up on the idea of forest gardening at my own apartment; the space we have to work with is extremely small and barely gets any sunlight during the day. What little gardening I do at home will probably be purely aesthetic in nature. However, we're lucky enough to have two of our best friends -- Julie and Tony -- living a mere six blocks away from us, and they have a huge, gorgeous space for gardening that they've generously offered to share. As we've been working on getting it tilled and laid-out, curious neighbors have all come out of the woodwork to give their two cents, and all seem happy that we're returning the space to its former glory. We had mentioned that the soil is unusually rich (especially for the middle of a city lot!) and one neighbor told us that, years ago, the whole neighborhood was an apple orchard. Really though, this is amazing soil. It looks better than the bagged stuff we've been bringing in! The weeds sure have been loving it. Common mallow has pretty much taken over the entire back yard, and some of the suckers have been a real challenge to pull up. I'm sure that we'll be in for quite a battle as the weather continues to get warmer.

So, since Julie and I each have a different gardening focus this year, our garden is going to be dual-purpose; Julie is working on growing culinary and medicinal herbals, and I'm growing mostly vegetables -- which is sort of backwards, considering I'm the one going to school for Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine! My goal is to test out different growing techniques on a small scale. Some things I'd like to try:

- Companion planting

- Succession planting

- Natural fertilizers

- Growing native plants to attract pollinators

Here are some of our veggies, herbs and flowers, growing happily under the growlights.

I initially tried to use all-natural materials (in this case, peat pots) rather than flats made of plastic, but Julie's seedlings seemed to be thriving better than mine in a Burpee grow system, so I bought one of those when it went on sale. Here's Julie's flat of seedlings. The zucchini are getting a little leggy and out of control...

I also have an interest in putting our plants to use in more than just salads -- not that I don't love a good caprese salad on a hot day. Some things I'd like to try:

- Herbal remedies (both based on TCM principles and my own hodgepodge of collected knowledge). For instance, I really want to make my own horehound cough syrup and lozenges, but rather than the usual recipes that include only horehound and sweetener, I want to include some Chinese herbs, like balloon flower and astragalus.

- Herb-infused vodkas and vinegars. A place in town makes a mean basil vodka martini. I will definitely be trying to make my own basil vodka

- Herbal Teas (This is more Julie's area of interest than mine)

- Plant-based dyes

I'll be sure to share all of my successes (and failures!) as the summer comes and goes. Here's a picture of our garden, all laid out and ready to go:

We've been creating our stepping stones from salvaged pieces of paving material from around the neighborhood, and the pea pyramids are from tree prunings. I think they have a very nice Blair Witch sort of feeling.