Officially first day of Spring occurred this weekend, and I thought this would be a good time to start the photo-documenting process of our vegetable garden!

This is what the space looks like now from my loft window. The roughly 25′x100′ plot of land is behind our building, as you can see it’s fenced in on two of the other three sides. Our immediate issues as we rookie gardeners see them are:

• • Roots of blackberry bushes: we now know that ripping as much of the root out as we can then covering the ground in black plastic works well, but isn’t very environmentally friendly. We’re currently looking into a more earth friendly option; someone suggested a gardeners black fabric material, that when doubled or tripled over underneath the garden beds might work. Key word at this point is ‘might’. Will most likely need to rent a rototiller, and we have boys who are looking forward to this part which is good.
• • Soil: where do we get organic weed-free soil?! Currently researching how to garden without using pesticides, chemicals, and other hazardous stuff.
• • Sunlight: this photo was taken on the second day of Spring at 4pm, so you can see by this point there’s not much sunlight getting back there. We figure come Summer time the plots on the east end (top of the photo) will get the best and most light, while the plots on the west end might not do as well. There is potential for eventually constructing some sort of small shed at this west end to keep gardening tools, a hose, etc.
• • Uneven ground: you can see the one side of the plot is quite a bit higher than the other side, so we need to decide where exactly to build the beds and how to deal with this raised area. Right now we’re thinking building the beds right up against the wall of the building so light & heat will reflect back on to the plants would be our best bet.

There seem to be some great resources out there for new gardeners, especially in the Mt.Pleasant/Main Street neighborhood we’re in:

• • West Coast Seeds is an online and Delta-based garden center specializing in heirloom, heritage and certified organic seeds for your organic growing, and we stock over 500 varieties of Untreated no GMO, open pollinated and hybrid seeds. They also have a monthly garden calendar for up to date garden advice which I have found particularly handy, and a garden resource page with such things as a planting chart and a gardening glossary.
• • City Farmer is a great resource and news site, I think the news site is their more recent page.
• • The UBC Botanical Garden and Center for Plant Research has a great and extensive forum page on their website with lots of info on workshops, organic gardening and garden design.
• • Salt Spring Seeds have a page of great links surrounding organic gardening in Canada.
• • Do you know of a resource that could help us and other start/continue their own personal or community garden? Please leave the details in the comments section!

And The White House is doing it, so the more the merrier!

We hope to get started on this very soon, and I will be back with more photos and progress shortly.

Cheers,

Jackie

Tags: community garden, gardening resources, organic garden in Vancouver BC

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 9:46 am and is filed under growin' my own food!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.