
My Vegetable Garden
On Gardens
This is the 5th year for my little 400 square foot garden plot. I’ve been a vegetable gardener for a long time – when my family moved to Canada in 1970, we were settled on a 40 acre hobby farm that was great for growing many things, as the Valley soil near Wolfville is so fertile and rock free compared to many places that it really is almost required to have a garden. Of course, as a teenager, I was also looking for jobs in the summers, and the local farmers obliged by hiring young strong boys to do lots of things like post hole digging and hay making to name but two. My history in the Valley includes growing some crops, like zucchini, for commercial gain, but most of the gardening was of the “let’s grow it to eat fresh” variety.
In Port Maitland I had several issues to challenge me, so here I went through having 4 and 8 foot long raised beds for everything (which worked well, but the deer enjoyed it as well!) to finally, starting when the pandemic hit, going back to what I know best and having the 20x20 foot row type garden. The size was determined by the fact that the ground had to be worked sufficiently to make the garden bed, but also the garden would need to be fully fenced with 4 foot high poultry netting and another 4 feet of intermittent wires strung between uprights – necessary to keep the racoons, rabbits and most importantly the deer out of the growing area!
It's always fun to begin the garden again, and then to see how much I can manage to make it yield. Not enough to have Norma and me be grocery store independent, but enough that we enjoy truly fresh local vegetables for most of the summer season and well into the fall.
It's as cousin Henry David Thoreau said - Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.