eggs and meat. The share can be ready for pick-up at the farm or delivered to a convenient central location. Some farmers prefer to distribute the share boxes at the farm market.
CSA organizations allow the small farmer to fund and plan his or her growing season, knowing that they have a market for the produce. When unusual crops are included in the share, most will give recipes to help you use them. Many have Facebook pages and websites where you can see what is in this week’s share. Or chat with others who are part of the same CSA and find out what they made with the produce. Open days at the farm are also advertised so that you can see the farm working and celebrate the season with your own farmer. ■
TWO
Designing a Vegetable Garden that Works for You
(All About Raised Beds and Containers)
When our eldest and his new wife purchased their first home, we went down to Atlanta to visit them. He took me into the fenced back yard and asked if they could put a small garden somewhere and maybe some herbs. The whole area was bathed in full sun and currently had only lawn with a small foundation bed. Two hours later we had shopped for supplies, assembled this 4×4 kit and and created not just a raised bed filled with colorful lettuce, but also a little herb garden right outside the back door where it is easy to reach. For new gardeners, such an almost instant garden is a perfect place to start.
The “ideal” vegetable garden is the one that fits into your lifestyle, your available space and how it connects with your home activities. What is the best way to evaluate your available space and needs? I recommend making a sketch of your property; it doesn’t have to look professional. A good way to begin your design is to draw the area on a piece of squared or graph paper and mark both the hardscape and vegetation areas.
Hardscape is the part of the landscape that is manmade, including areas that cannot be tilled. Any area covered with concrete or gravel is considered to be hardscape. Mark things like the driveway, fencing, deck or patio – things that can’t be moved or changed. Gravel paths can be moved if necessary, but if they are in a logical position such as a line to the garden shed, they are probably counted as hardscape too.
A typical landscape design takes into consideration the utility areas, such as where the garbage/recycle boxes go, compost areas, and entertainment areas that are currently in place. Also, mark lawns and existing tilled areas and trees. For a patio or deck, be sure to note seating and other amenities you plan to keep. When the overall layout of the property is on paper, the fun begins: where to put the vegetables and how many should I grow?
With so many demands on space, it is often difficult to define just one area for the vegetables. So rather than trying to find one garden space for all your vegetables, try finding areas that can double for more than one use. A small container with lettuce or herbs is quite happy on the deck – but will also be fine in the center of a patio table where your guests can snip a few leaves to put into their sandwich right where they are eating! Likewise, window boxes look lovely on the deck railings when filled with flowering annuals, but if you slip in a colorful pepper or tomato, you create a mixed container that looks attractive as well as being productive.
Vegetables are plants too! Sometimes we get hung up on finding a perfect place for the vegetables and forget that they are just plants. A vegetable can be an annual, perennial or even a shrub. Just as an attractive ornamental shrub looks fine in the garden, so can an edible shrub such as blueberries. An integrated landscape mixes up all the garden plants, both vegetables and ornamentals: lettuce in the rose garden, tomatoes along the fence line in front of clematis and a row of blue kale used as a border to the perennial bed. This integration is particularly important if you want to grow your vegetables in the front garden where curb appeal is expected. See how nice those colorful chives look on the page opposite.
Or, the area for your vegetables can be placed as a stand-alone raised bed. For an apartment or condo with a deck or hardscaped patio, you can design with interesting containers, as well as vertical treatments. Much more about containers below, but first let’s look at raised beds.
6 Great Vegetables for the Front Garden:
Our front gardens are on show to the world, so having attractive looking vegetables is important. Try these colorful vegetables in your sunny front yard garden.
Artichoke: This is a large back-of-the-border plant with great yellow flowers.
Red basils: Red or purple basils make great foliage plants at the start of the summer, and then the pink flowers turn it from foliage to a beautiful flowering annual.
Chards: No longer are chards basic green with white stems, they now come with bright red or yellow stems and make great middle-of-the-border plants.
Kales: Kales can be blue or green, large or small. Try the curly blue kales for a border in front of your perennial bed, or the large kale in front of an evergreen hedge.
Red pepper: Small, bright red jalapeno peppers brighten up the middle of any garden.
Okra: A common Southern annual that can be grown everywhere, the okra plants put out hibiscus-like flowers in white or red. They are one of the most attractive vegetables and grow to about 4 feet, so place at the back or middle of the garden bed.
Raised Beds
Raised beds are a perfect solution for many situations in the garden, like poor soil or hardscape that makes digging in the garden impossible. Raised beds can also be looked at as a temporary solution in rental properties, as you can disassemble them almost as easily as you can make them. One of the many advantages to a raised bed is the ease of maintenance. The loose, soilless mix is free of weeds and grass at the start, and any weeds that arrive are easy to remove. Most beds can be weeded in a matter of minutes.
Don’t get hung up on size! Although most plans for raised beds refer to a 4×4-foot square bed, it is not the only dimension you can use. Maybe your small area can’t accommodate a 4-foot width but is longer than 4 feet, such as along a wall or building. A 2×8-foot bed works just as well as a square one. The minimum dimension for one large vegetable plant – say, a tomato or cabbage – is a 1×1-foot square, so you’re free to think in terms of several squares all together – or you can slot the vegetables around the garden, using one square foot here and another one somewhere else. That one square foot is also big enough for many little mesclun and salad plants and almost a dozen onions, scallions and leeks.
Building a Raised Bed
Raised beds in a community garden.
