GROWING my Garden.... FROM SEED!

Italian Vegetable Seeds: https://amzn.to/2KtRX9R

On the previous episode I prepared my soil for planting, on this episode I’ll take you through the process of segmenting my soil into plots and planting the seeds.

Ideally the first step to the garden would be edging it but due to time restrictions I had to get the seeds in the ground. Not on camera was the 40 bags of compost I added to my soil. It would have been better to get a dump truck full of soil to cover my yard but who knows maybe next year I can afford that. I first grabbed a 2x4 and used it to layout some basic lines in the soil where I wanted to create my garden squares. After my grid pattern was drawn out in the soil I proceeded to dig out the grid pattern, piling up the extra soil on the plots. In general all the lines in the soil are as wide as my boot making it easy to walk in between my crops. I also have 4 concrete blocks that I layed down as jumping stones to easily make my way in and out of the garden.

Here I have a swiss chard starter in the ground that was planted all in one block. It’s important before they get much bigger that I properly separate them so they have more space to grow.

Here I’m planting some Italian lettuce, throughout this series you’ll see a handful of unique italian vegetables in my garden as there is a store locally that carries these imported seeds.

After loosening the soil up a bit I’ve put the seeds in an try to pat them down into the soil a bit and cover them up. After the seeds are in give them a watering to start the sprouting process and to make them sticky and cling to the soil and not just blow away in the wind. A few things in my garden aren’t started from seed like these strawberries my neighbour gave me.

As I plant this buttercup squash you can see I place the popsicle stick on the northside of every soil plot to make it easy to find the label of any of the crops. Now if you’re wondering why I made these trenches in my garden, it’s quite simple, last year I had a garden plot in Vancouver just beside a river. The ground was very fertile but also very wet. I noticed an elderly Chinese man has done this with his garden plot and when it rained the excess water would just run into the troughs and away from his plot preventing them from flooding. He had a very successful yield, much more than most others in the community garden so I adopted his approach.

On the side of my yard like most houses is just a useless strip of grass. Determined to make good use of it, I dedicated this area to anything large like squash, cantaloupe, melons, brussel sprouts, broccoli, kohlrabi, beets and carrots.

This final patch of soil gets the least sun and is full of rocks. Not ideal for growing anything really I chose this as my leafy greens patch.

Here you can see the final result, all the squares are dug out and any spot with a long barbecue skewer sticking out of it is one that isn’t planted yet which makes it easy to know how many plots I have left.
This large square is my best land, it gets the most sun and is mostly devoid of rocks. Along this brick wall I will plant corn, and only corn. This L shaped spot around the house where the plum tree used to be has nice loose sandy soil that I’ll save exclusively for tomatoes and peppers.