I have blogged Front Yard Garden and I will probably blog about it again in the future but quite simply, I love my front yard garden. And if anyone tells you they don’t have time for gardening, they don’t understand how easy it is to grow food.
Because we live along a very busy street, our front yard is not a fun place to hang out nor a safe place for the kids to play. We do that sort of stuff in the yard behind the house. So, a couple of years ago or more I built a couple garden boxes. I took some old 2x6s I had and made a garden box. Just small ones, about 42″x30″.
I placed the garden boxes right on top of the lawn and covered the lawn inside the box with a thick layer of cardboard.
On top of that I emptied out the contents of our composter. Then I added a layer of grass clippings. And then a couple bags of mushroom manure or some other soil that I bought at our local garden centre.
Then we planted some seeds: carrots, beets, spinach, kale, radishes and a couple of potatoes. And that was it.
I didn’t need to weed the garden because the seeds were planted so densely that there simply wasn’t room for the weeds to grow!
In the fall I collected up piles of leaves from the backyard and piled them, actually mounded them, on top of the garden box. Like three feet deep on top of the garden box!
In the spring the leaves had shrunk down so that I was able to dump a couple more bags of mushroom manure on the garden box before planting again.
In the second year I built a couple more garden boxes as supplies came available. A guy was doing a renovation a couple houses over and he had some extra lumber – quickly turned into garden boxes. Same process to get them productive.
We now have seven productive garden boxes (Pallet Garden) in our front yard to grow a wide variety of vegetables including potatoes, kale, spinach, peas, beans, carrots, beets, a variety of squashes, monster-size sunflowers and many fresh greens.
It really takes no time at all once the boxes are built. We do not turn the soil over – ever. In the fall we still heap the boxes with leaves and in the spring we get a few bags of manure or garden soil delivered to our home from a local high school that is doing a fund raiser.
Having a home garden is very simple and straightforward – once the garden box is built and it is a great way to connect kids to the source of their food. I encourage everyone to grow food – even if it is just a a handful of green onions or herbs, grow something!!