I was at the Little Italy Farmer's market http://www.littleitalysd.com/mercato/on a beautiful, sunny Saturday morning and happened by a booth staffed by Karen Contreras of Urban Plantations. http://www.urbanplantations.com/. Wow, I was excited, she consulted on the exact thing that I wanted to do...turn my lawn into a beautiful garden. So, she came out and took a look at my large rectangular front yard, walked around and gave me tips on where to place the garden and also how to turn my lawn into soil. As it turns out, I didn't have so much a lawn, as a green weed patch, which actually was a good thing...much easier to dispatch than a true lawn. In terms of where to have my garden, we picked the spot that would get the most sun, which was off to the left of my front door, in a space not shaded by the house and close to the street. In garden terms, this is called "siting". We also talked about how to change the green stuff into soil. Karen suggested "lasagna gardening" which involves putting down cardboard, then compost, chicken manure, straw, basically anything you can find that will turn into compost over time, and then you wait for it to do it's dual job - kill the grass and ad a nice layer of nourishing compost to the top of your newly cleared soil. My results were mixed. I definitely killed the grass, but when I investigated the what was underneath, I did not have the beautiful, soft crumbly soil I had hoped for. Instead, I had a little compost on top of super hard patch of dirt that was pretty much unyielding to my attempts to plant anything in it.
Last summer, I did plant a small watch of Sugar Baby watermelons http://www.localharvest.org/heirloom-sugar-baby-watermelon-seed-C6664 - 6 total. Here's a picture of the watermelon I was trying to grow from a seed catalog...also note, this is a heirloom. That means that the seeds that I kept from last year, should be able to be used to grow this year's watermelon. In addition to the watermelon, only a lone zucchini made it into the ground. That was all I managed to dig in.
Everything else went into planters around the edge of my hoped for garden. I also got some surprise "volunteer" pumpkins that grew up from the middle of the garden from seeds still within the compost. They had giant leaves and between the watermelons and pumkins, I did have a garden full of beautiful pumpkin leaves, but not the garden I had hoped for when I started.
Still, it was fun and I was inspired to keep trying. The mini watermelons that I grew were delicious, but small. Most were the size of a softball. Have you ever seen a watermelon the size of a softball? The first one split open in the garden because it got overripe while I was waiting for it to grow to full-size. The pumpkins were cute, almost a dozen in all, from a large to tiny and very hard. It took a hammer to get one open when I wanted to bake it. I also raised other "mini" veggies in containers. I grew butternut squash, cantilope, bell peppers, eggplant, tomatos, tomatillo and a single spagetti squash. These all did a valiant job, considering their limited root space. They were all minatures compared to what you see in the store. Hopefully this summer, "summer 2.0" I'll have better luck in getting these into the ground and giving them all the space and nutrients they need to grow.
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