I tried a couple of home made boxes on the deck. ($8 plastic tubs.) Failed for me. Maybe boiling hot weather did it. Tried toms, zukes, basil, cilantro and carrots…nothing! But I did have some success with growing yams greens. Next year will try onions in them.
(956) grow boxes gardening systems - YouTube
I like trees. Plant em and let em go!
That’s good! I wish I had 2 acres…or some more.
I’d like to be rural and maybe have a dog and some chickens. (If the 2 will mix.) All I have in 2/3 acre. Less with house and driveway taking up space.
Can’t have a dog here. No time to walk it. If rural, it could roam some.
Have to grow my own food for health concerns. Everything here in California is poison or toxic so it’s best to grow your own to compensate for all the other garbage we have to eat off season.
I do have to admit there’s nothing better than growing, harvesting and eating tasty organic veggies from the garden. It’s so worth it all. Also saving seeds.
I’m in a 12x32 cabin on my two acres, so no space taken up at all. I live out in the county. The nearest town is 4 miles from here and boasts a population of 256. I’ve no real driveway, just a culvert to get across the ditch. There’s the local rancher’s horse pasture on three sides and the road in front. The man’s cattle ranch is over 800 acres. Quiet. Real quiet.
Previous to this I’ve always lived in apartments. 42 years of apartments. COVID was the last straw.
I always plant sweet basil and marigolds between my tomato plants.
Love the smell of that sweet basil.
Good add to some tomato soup.
EarthBoxes are well engineered and fairly fool proof if the instructions are followed. Dead simple and well worth the start up cost. I can’t speak to the various homemade SIP instructions (as well as other things) floating around the Internet.
Basil is a top priority for me too. So good to have fresh basil all the time for caprese salads, tomato soup, and pesto.
Throughout my life I’ve usually had a garden, but don’t have time for one right now… working a lot and prioritizing fruit trees and other big yard projects. Just have a few pots on the deck with tomatoes, cucumber, basil, thyme, and kale. I’ll probably add a few more for peas and bok choy. It’s really nice having even a small amount of fresh veggies.
I have both. Veggies and fruit trees and citrus. this is what I picked this morning before it rained. I have buckets of herbs too!
We grow what we can’t buy. Or things that are just fun to grow like okra. Sour cherries, peaches, tomatoes, peppers, okra, rhubarb mainly.
We don’t plant to can but plant to eat. We do put up some salsa and jams.
Our garden is almost work free. We have a strip 3 ft wide by 50 ft long, deep with mulch. (Little to no weeding) We mow right up to the mulch. I burred a water line set on a RainTree watering timer. In the spring we plant and put down 12-12-12, in the summer we just pick. No tilling required
Our 3 peach trees are a lot more work. Spring pruning produced a pickup truck load of trimmings, thinning flowers and small fruits and spraying every 10-14 days. Then picking peaches for 10 days. Then summer pruning!
I love purslane so much. I let any I see keep going, I’m hoping it covers more ground every year. growing other varieties from seed then scattering that to get even more, and more diverse kinds as “weeds”.
people always tell me to eat lambs quarters and wild amaranth but I dislike the stuff and it over grows. purslane is much better as food and forage.
I’m being so patient waiting for seed from these:
to mix into the pathways to go with these cross pollinated and “standard” that are already there:
the only other weeds I encourage are dandelion and clover.
my veggie garden and orchard are mixed together. hoping to put in paver paths this fall, so next year I can walk through more easily. there’s apples, pears and a mulberry mixed in the “beds” (just mounds really with no edges). I would love to put walkways between the “beds”, using the trees as a guide for them.
my trees outside the veg garden area have sunflowers, j artichoke and sage, basil, purslane all around the bottom- then a little ways out there’s chip mulch. I can pick herbs when I check on the fruit.
if it was a more isolated area I would put mint around the trees but I don’t want it to spread too much.
my chestnut crab is surrounded by prairie sage and sunflowers and does very well that way- they’re shorter sunflowers.
my honey locust trunk is buried in the Jerusalem artichoke. I think it’s kept it from making suckers, it’s doing really well this way.
We are growing everything and anything that we can eat that will grow.
We’re pretty committed to a sugar free low carb lifestyle, except for natural fruit sugar, so it’s extra motivation. One of the best desserts you can have on a low carb diet is low carb yogurt and berries, figs, etc, yum!
It’s amazing what fruit tastes like when you stop eating sugar!
Our garden has been a major staple in our diet, especially salads and baked zucchini, winter squash for the winter. Without the garden, the lifestyle would be majorly restricted to mainstream options which are practically always toxic in their own way.
The only way to insure abundance is to grow enough to give away…. But next year, we will make some changes because it’s been a lot of work. Growing your own food is a part time job. But saves a lot of money during harvest time.
No fence?
Absolutely! I grow tomatoes, green beans, garlic, Swiss chard, pumpkins, eggplant, basil, raspberries…
I agree with you about purslane. I’ve let it go to seed a couple of times in my vegetable garden and now whenever I till I get some seedlings that have nice plump leaves and stems.
I have about a half acre cleared and fenced. About half of that is berries and fruit trees. The other half vegetables.
I’ve been experimenting with easier stuff like sunchokes, asparagus and peanuts. The plan is to grow all (or most) of our fruits and veggies and buy our meat elsewhere. The fruit trees aren’t old enough to have really started producing but they have been growing quickly the past few years. We also have chickens for eggs. I find winter gardening to be easier and I just started a lot of daikon radish and collard greens.
I’m also trying to grow purslane this year. It seems like another easy green to grow.
I like chicory and raddichio for early spring greens, they reseed just like purslane here, and come on earlier than anything else. then the orach appears, it also reseeded I planted two years ago. it gets tall.
then I have spinach that I plant, lettuce and kale etc. as those are going and it’s all lettuce, the purslane arrives just in time.
of course in the heat of summer months it’s beet leaf chard, NZ spinach and collards- sweet potato leaves- none of that stuff will reseed though.
I’ve got a lot of ground cherries starting up on the edges of paths and I’m glad of them, I like that they’re weedy and I can let them go. this is the first year there’s more than one or two and I’m hoping they take off on their own like the tomatillos do.
ah that’s the best!!
Yes we do a 50x100 foot garden every year.
