Growing Food In Your Backyard

Anyone that goes grocery shopping knows that food prices have risen and that prices especially for organics have always been high. One way I've dealt with this is to try to grow the majority of our fruits and vegetables at least during the spring/summer months.

I use raised beds and containers. I used to have 4 large raised beds but we're re-working them this fall and I'm changing to having more but narrower beds. The far left bed is the old size and the two on the right are the newer sizes.

Right now I only have one bed planted with fall/winter veggies. That's swiss chard and red cabbage growing in that bed.

As soon as we get the other beds finished I'll be planting some spinach, lettuce, kale, broccoli and smaller varieties of carrots. I have my last crop of potatoes and some onion in one of the older beds. I also have some potatoes growing in a container

That's a second crop. The first one did really well so I decided to try it with another variety of potato. As a matter of fact, my beds were all full this summer but I had some corn seeds so I tried growing corn in a container and it worked!

Those are the dried stalks in the picture above. I got about two ears per corn stalk. So I was excited that this experiment worked! If you don't have room for a garden try growing things in containers. It's amazing what you can do with some big pots! Even when we lived in apartments I always grew some tomatoes and herbs on our balcony.

I've always been interested in simple living and suburban self-sufficiency. So when we bought this property one of the first things I did was to plant some blueberry bushes, blackberry bushes, grape vines, apple, pear, quince and nectarine trees. We had an existing old apple tree here. So in the summer I very rarely have to buy fruit! All my fruit is organic. So far I haven't had to spray but even if I did I'd at least know what I was spraying and hopefully would only spray as needed instead of being on a program of spraying.

These are my blackberries. I've found that for my family of three I don't need a huge amount of fruit bushes. We have 3 blueberry bushes and they give us so many berries I'm always able to freeze lots. Same with the blackberries. I picked blackberries everyday this summer and made cobbler almost every day and I still have some in the freezer!

I'm much better at growing things in the summer than I am in the fall/winter. So that's a challenge I've set for myself this year. I'd love to be able to be able to eat from my garden year round.

I won't tell you how to start a backyard garden because it all really depends on where you live, what kind of space and light you have, how much time you want to devote to it and a number of other factors. There are so many good books out there to help you. I recommend:

1. The Self-Sufficient Suburban Garden by Jeff Ball
2. All New Square Foot Gardening or Sq. Ft Gardening by Mel Bartholomew
3. The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery
4. Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It by John Seymour

Now is a good time to start planning your spring/summer gardens but if you don't have the space or desire I would suggest checking out your local farmers markets or joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).