This Tiny Vegetable Garden

Now sleeping with a thick layer of leaves and grass clippings that should make a nice mulch in the spring, the veggie bed is a good spot for overwintering a few plants that didn't quite make it into the shade garden or front foundation beds this fall. We had walks and the patio replaced this fall, and I lost a small border on one side of the house in the process. Plants grown for Native Seed Gardeners were in that border. They were transplanted for safekeeping into the veggie bed back in September, and will be moved to new homes early next spring.

Also overwintering in the veggie bed are several Baptisia australis plants started from seeds back in July or August. They're so small, I hope a few will make it through the winter. Tall bellflowers from my trip to Mom's back in September were given a temporary home in the veggie bed too. Since so much of the shade garden was chewed to ground (probably by rabbits,) while I was away, I couldn't really tell where it was safe to plant. That's also my excuse reason for once again not planting bulbs this fall.

Our veggie bed is only about 4' x 10,' and gets less than 5 hours a day of direct sun. Still, it produced an amazing abundance of produce all spring, summer, and fall. We grew lots of lettuce and greens, tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, peas, garlic, beets, radishes, squash, and several varieties of peppers. The bed was planted intensively using square-foot, interplanting, and succession-planting methods. We enjoyed beautiful, fresh, delicious, healthful organic produce every day, all through the gardening season, and had more peppers, green beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes than we could eat.

I shared some veggies with family and friends, and made tomato juice, blanched and froze extra green beans, diced and froze extra peppers, and made pickled jalapenos, pickled green tomatoes, and bread-and-butter cucumber pickles. . . all from our new little raised veggie bed in a part-sun side yard, built late last fall using retaining wall pavers with a thick layer of newspaper at the bottom to kill the grass, and alternating 'lasagna' layers of compost, fallen leaves, and grass clippings. Over the winter the layers aged. By spring we had the most beautiful garden soil, rich, crumbly, and full of earthworms.

Newspaper-lined, lasagna-style, raised, mulched beds have made a believer out of me. I don't think I pulled more than ten weed seedlings from the veggie bed all season. Watering was minimal, limited to about six weeks midsummer when we had no rain. The soil held moisture very well, and the mulch helped prevent evaporation. I've never had such a small vegetable garden before. I'm still amazed how little work, and how productive our little bed was. I can hardly wait for next year!