Last spring, I wrote a story about trying to produce enough food in the city to be self-sufficient, using my own yards in Notre Dame de Grâce as a test case.
With tips from Action Communiterre, a community group that runs collective gardens in Montreal’s west end, I dug up about a third of my front-yard lawn and planted beets, onions, carrots, peppers, beans, rhubarb, strawberries, arugula and potatoes. Our backyard is very shady, but we planted cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, lettuce, beans, beets and onions in the sunniest parts, and hoped for the best.
With lots of sunny days this summer, our front-yard garden blossomed. Our tomato plants are more than five feet tall and still producing fruit into early fall. We’ve been getting rhubarb all summer, and have eaten our fill of arugula. Even in the shadier backyard, we’ve eaten the first cucumbers we’ve ever grown ourselves, and picked lots of baby lettuce to toss into salads.
We got some surprise tomato plants growing from our compost, and some mystery melon is growing in our front yard. No one seems to know what it could be, but a farmer I consulted suspects it’s a cross between a squash and a melon.
But it hasn’t been all good news on the gardening front. A blue jay and several squirrels have been eating our cherry tomatoes the second they turn the faintest shade of yellow, never mind getting all the way to ripe, juicy perfection. We suffered a terrible assault by slugs, who decimated our bean plants and usually got to our few measly strawberries before we could. The onions proved irresistible to the squirrels who dug them up as quickly as we could plant them.
Since the goal of the project when we started was to see how self-sufficient we could be, over the summer we kept track of everything we harvested from the garden. While we definitely couldn’t live on what we were able to grow, we were able to save $86.05 so far by growing our own food instead of buying it. It cost us about $90 to buy the seeds, plants and extra compost to get the garden started, so it’s just a matter of days until we break even. Labour was minimal, once everything was planted.
Here’s a look at what our garden produced, and what I would have paid for the equivalent amount of produce at our local organic food store. This doesn’t include arugula, onions, beets, carrots, rhubarb, peppers, potatoes and soup beans that have yet to be harvested, nor the dozens of still unripe tomatoes on the plants:
Arugula: about 300 grams $8.60
Basil: about 1 small bunch $3.69
Beets: about 3.4 kilograms so far $14.68
Cucumber: 4 so far $12.00
Green beans: 230 g $3.00
Tomatoes
beefsteak: 2 kg $10.95
cherry: 230 g $2.00
plum: 3.7 kg $17.50
Peppers: 110 g so far $0.55
Potatoes: 1.1 kg $3.09
Rhubarb: 2.6 kg $8.55
Strawberries: about 110 g $1.44
TOTAL $86.05