Vertical Gardening

This blog post was prepared by Gillian, mom, urban gardener, and Assistant Manager at Nurtured.

One of the problems with living in a city is the lack of space to garden. My back “yard” is a parking spot for my motorcycle and our family car and about a dozen dump trucks and other kids toys. We’ve got a lovely tree and one raised bed on the side of the paved parking space, and that’s about it for anything green, but it hasn’t stopped me! My garden is underway! I planted three varieties of cherry tomatoes and peas about two months ago and they’re all doing very well. I have about two dozen tomato plants inside and seven pea plants outside in the one raised bed (which is surrounded by gout weed).

I read about vertical gardening online and in Grow Organic, the best Nova Scotia-specific gardening book I’ve ever read, and loved the idea of thinking outside the box for my complicated space. I plan on hanging a lot of my tomato plants upside down, and I read a great little article about planting in a shoe organizer, and thought what a perfect idea it was. I have a perfect deck with a railing that gets a lot of sun!

This year the majority of my seeds were Heritage Seeds from Annapolis Seeds in Nova Scotia, a small organic seed company run by an 18 year old guy. From him I purchased my beans, peas, tomatoes, arugula, lettuce, basil and cilantro. A couple of weeks ago my son and I spent a couple of sunny hours outside filling up the pockets with soil from a local company called Halifax Seed, and planting and then watering.

This is what my little urban garden looked like just after planting. My arugula is getting big (and I’ve tasted some already!) and I’m looking forward to seeing this full of green in the next couple of months!

-Gillian