Hello, With the season officially finished, and all the gardens closed up and put to sleep for the winter, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for coming with us on this journey. Your enthusiasm, feedback and input make cracking the code on vegetable gardening in the city possible – and a pleasure! We love the opportunity to learn how to make your vegetable garden as beautiful, productive, and easy to maintain as possible. Every season we learn so much about how to do things even better. While closing up the gardens, we planted garlic in the front right corner of your garden bed. It should be the first thing to come up in the spring and will stay in until July. You can, however, start using the greens as a garlicky garnish right away. Just make sure you leave enough leaves so the plant can grow! We’ve identified a main problem in almost all of the gardens that didn’t do well this year. We’ve found that since our garden soil is so rich, the roots from nearby trees or cedar hedges sneak in and take over the garden bed. This makes the soil root bound – it becomes so thick with roots you can’t even get your hand through! The tree roots choke the vegetables and drink up all the nutrients and water. The spring plantings did well because the tree roots hadn’t taken over yet, but by mid-summer, everything stopped growing. If this was the case in your garden, we will come by in the spring and dig out your garden and lay down a couple layers of geo-textile to block the tree roots but let the water pass through. This is something that will need to be done every couple of years, as the tree roots will eventually penetrate. Otherwise, it was usually a case of too little sun. In this case, you would have to either prune back trees that are casting too much shade, or we can move the garden to a sunnier location if you have identified one. Next year we will be:
- taking oversized vegetables like broccoli, rapini, cabbage and definitely zucchini out of the main garden;
- planting root vegetables (carrots and beets) in the spring, and again in the fall;
- doing the fall planting a full three weeks earlier to take advantage of the longer days of summer to establish the plants!
We will also be offering some new packages:
- Additional vegetable gardens for large plants and perennials such as brassicas, zucchini, asparagus, mushrooms and potatoes;
- A yard maintenance package that includes opening flower gardens, closing flower gardens and four monthly maintenance visits.
Please let me know if there is anything else we can do better. We will be calling in March to discuss the services that would interest you and what types of vegetables you would like to have in your garden. Have a fantastic winter! Tereska Gesing