The garden

Recently, Brian and I have been really interested in permaculture. Obsessed really. During commutes and free time at work we read text books, articles, and blogs about it. By night we watch lectures and videos about people`s permaculture farms. All the books we get from the library have something to do with agriculture. And along with all this reading, we`ve been experimenting in the back yard (more like the bit of grass between our building and the next one over, but it works). We started seeds inside in March, hoed up the grass in late April, and finally put things in the ground in May. It turned out to be a bit early, but most things made it anyway. It`s been incredibly educating and a lot of fun. Delicious too. Here is the evolution
up til now.

In the beginning, there was dirt. Good black dirt. Before that there were weeds and grasses, but I didn`t think to take a real before shot.

We ended up losing a couple of tomatoes to cold, so we had to buy a couple of plants, but everything else we grew from seed. We also ended up expanding 4 different times. The first and second were a sunflower patch and an herb patch you can see below. The others came later.

Above is the garden in June. It had gotten a bit longer and a lot greener. All we put on it was water, mulch, and EM (effective microorganism) bokashi, a Japanese compost inoculant that eats up your kitchen waste fast and yields a nice brown juice that plants love. It also yields a ton of humus that we`ll throw on when the fall garden finishes up. Below are some more pictures in June.

Now it`s late fall in Sapporo. The mounds are finished, the sunflowers have been harvested and most things are winding down. Except for the new plants of the fall garden.

Unfortunately, my camera broke right after the June garden pictures, so the few harvest pictures we have are blurry cell phone affairs. But not so blurry you can`t make out the size of that lettuce.

Chard was a major producer. We seriously over planted chard. But it`s lovely, easy, and delicious!

We got enough habaneros to make hot sauce AND spicy jelly, and we`ve still got more than we can deal with. We harvested tons of calendula to make a balm one day, and lots of coriander, dill seeds, onion seeds for baking, and sunflower seeds. In fact, the only things we didn`t get tons of were okra and eggplant. They got shaded out by the zucchini monsters early on. But we learned a lot and have big plans for next year.