Green up your yard – plant a garden

As I look out my window, all I see is green which is a sure sign that spring here in New England. The trees have gone from having leaf buds to starting to show young leaves, and even our big white pine is a deeper shade of green. After the long hard colorless winter, it is really nice to see the greening of spring.

This weekend I may need to pull out the old reel mower and mow the lawn for the first time this year since it is starting to get a little long in spots. Fortunately, I don’t have a lot of lawn to mow since most of our open land is consumed with garden beds, but it wasn’t always that way. Most of our land is forested but when we first moved in we followed the stereotype and planted our front yard in grass and carved out a small area on the south side for a garden. Well, over time we found we wanted more garden space to grow more than we could in our original garden plot so we decided to start taking over the front yard. We started with 3 raised garden beds, and year after year it grew until its current size of 14 raised beds in the front yard plus 3 in the side yard plus the original garden plot on the south side. That is currently about 850 sq ft. of garden space. Why so much? Well, all I can tell you is that despite all these beds, we still don’t have enough room to provide my wife and I with vegetables to last us the year. Admittedly, we do not spend all our time on the gardens, so I’m sure they could be more productive then they are, but the point is that we are still planning on finding more room to grow more.

Don’t we miss a nice green yard? No, be cause we have a nice green yard, it just isn’t grass. Sure, it isn’t your typical front yard, but how many people can say that there yard is green, but yet you can still eat from it? I have nothing against grass, and we still have plenty of it, but our thought is that if we have to expend the water resources and energy maintaining a yard, it might as well be full of something that you can eat instead of something that you can just look at. We find the garden wonderful to admire all through the spring, summer and fall, and just like grass, most of it is green. And another side benefit is having less lawn to mow. Sure there is weeding and tending to the plants but this isn’t much more than you would do in your lawn anyway.

So, why turn some of that green lawn into green productive garden space and get some wonderful vegetables out of it instead of just the pain of mowing, bagging and raking? It is a green idea that is not only green, but edible. Then again, this is just life according to Troy.