Just what I wanted to hear

"Overall it's looking good," says Lulu De Troit, Greenhouse Manager at Sunset Nursery in Pembroke.

It's her first assessment of our garden and she had good news and bad news. The best news is that we can already start eating some of our crops! The herbs and lettuce are ripe for the picking. In fact, De Troit says picking them will help them grow stronger.

She also said the tree is not a big deal. Although it will take up the water and some nutrients she said the plants will be fine.

She did have bad news, as I mentioned, but you'll have to watch A-Morning tomorrow to find out what it was.

Now that the garden is in place the next steps will be to fertilize and eventually weed. In terms of fertilizer, there are a number of different products available including organic options. De Troit recommends different types of fertilizer for different stages of growth (more details tomorrow).

But the best advice she gave me was to just have fun with the garden and enjoy the fruits of our labour. She says if you're a first time gardener there's no need to get too technical about it all.

Plus, you can always visit your local nursery and ask for a little advice!

I hope R comes home for lunch so he can be the first to taste the lettuce growing in his backyard!

If you have questions, suggestions or stories about your garden send an e-mail to jennifer@atv.ca

Make sure to include some photos!

The Garden Experiment

I don’t know where the idea came from. But there we were in the middle of the nursery excitedly piling plants onto our green plastic cart. We pulled tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and even a pumpkin. 

We were going to plant a backyard vegetable garden.

I love vegetables and I’ve always wanted a vegetable garden but I’ve lived in apartments for the past 9 years. So when R offered up a corner of his backyard I jumped at the chance!

With a pile of plants in the back of the truck and a trailer full of top soil we made our way back to his house with no idea what we were doing. I’ve never planted a garden and I have trouble keeping house plants alive. And at this point we’ve done no research.

I’ll be honest. R did all the heavy lifting while I finished up some work. He loosened the soil and put down the top soil and I joined him just in time to sprinkle on the fertilizer and rake it in.

As I started writing the names of our plants on little blue stakes I realized we had purchased 20 different plants. So much for starting small. We had two types of carrots, six different herbs, four types of lettuce and one watermelon (that was clearly my idea).

If I had been planting them on my own they would have likely ended up in some chaotic mess. As it turns out, R is a little obsessive compulsive so the lines were drawn and marked with a measuring tape so every plant had the proper amount of room. A few hours later we had a garden!

The only question is: now what?