Tiny Market Garden

tiny-market-garden

Here is my market garden of cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini and sweet potatoes.

GUEST POST by Maureen Lefebvre

This year I planted a ?market garden?. Do I plan to have enough vegetables to sell at the market you wonder? No, this year my garden holds only specific plants that I want to be able to eat on the spur of the moment, harvested from my own plants. In the spring I purposed to make use of the Kamloops Farmer’s Market instead of planting a lot myself. So far I have made it downtown every week, either on Wednesday or Saturday, for fresh fruit, vegetables and meat. The atmosphere is friendly and the vendors are more than happy to chat about their products. I feel good supporting local farmers and producers while getting superior, nutrient-dense food on my table.

The vegetables that I have chosen to plant are cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini and sweet potatoes. This is my first time to plant sweet potatoes, so I?m curious to see how they do. The slips came from Vesey?s Seeds, PEI. They are only one of a few suppliers of sweet potato slips in Canada. The slips arrived mid-June looking very dead. The 6-8 inch stems were topped by a few wilted or dead leaves. I wasn?t hopeful that they would survive, especially because our weather at that time was still so cold and wet. However, I put them in the ground and waited for the sun. The plants are mailed well into the growing season because they can?t tolerate any cold at all. Now that they have been in the ground about a month all but one out of the twelve are growing leaves and the plants with no shading at all even seem to be thriving.

sweet-potato-slips

Here are my little sweet potato plants.