How Does Your Garden Grow?

by Heather Ford-Helgeson

Heather's Raised Garden - early June 2012

If you read my previous post, you'll know that I started my first vegetable garden this year; a raised bed pictured above. Though small, it is causing big changes. I absolutely love it. If I want some herbs, I go pick them. If I want a salad, I go pick from my variety of greens. Most of the tomato plants are next to the raised bed and I also planted some corn there. The chipmunks got almost all the corn but the tomato plants are thriving and if all goes well, my family will have a plethora of juicy ones from which to pick. Every morning I water and tend to my plants almost as lovingly as I do my two-year-old. There is no doubt I am hooked and I have already mapped out an area in my back yard of which I am going to dig up in the fall for next years LARGE vegetable garden adventure; Can. Hardly. Wait.


I am constantly on the look-out now for urban vegetable growers and I'm amazed by people's use of space. A young guy in my South Minneapolis neighborhood has turned his entire boulevard into a vegetable garden. A couple in the same area put a couple of raised beds in their side yard, mixing it in with their landscaping.  There's a woman around the corner from me who has turned her front-yard into one large food-producing garden and made it beautiful to-boot and a couple of blocks from me a family has turned all the land next to their garage into a huge garden. I have seen window boxes turned into herb gardens, planters used entirely for tomatoes, planters with mixed vegetables and flowers, wheel-barrows as raised beds, large tires filled with tomato and bean plants, and one of our long-time clients had HSG transplant a bunch of her perennials that were next to her pool and then turned the whole area into a vegetable garden. These are but a few examples of great ingenuity.

Are you tending to your own produce garden? Please tell us about it in the comment section below. We love to hear about what you're growing and how it's going. You can also ask us any questions you have on any of your gardening needs.

Great growing and we will write again soon.