About My Garden
I’ve recently moved to a new home. When we bought the house in the middle of winter, I was excited to own one whole luxurious acre on which to garden. I picked the spot in the yard that I thought would receive the most light, but, not knowing exactly how much sun my veggie garden would receive, I decided to plant everything in half-wine barrels. If it didn’t work out, I could ‘move’ my garden to a more suitable spot.
In the spring, as the leaves grew on the trees, it became pretty obvious that my vegetables would not be receiving full sunlight. There isn’t a single spot on my luxurious (and heavily wooded) acre that receives more than four hours of sun.
At first I was desolate. In two months in the ground, my tomatoes did literally no growing. Within the same two months, my eggplant transplants still didn’t have real leaves, and the melon seedlings had only one set of true leaves. Every time I saw tomatoes or corn stretching towards the sky in some neighboring kitchen garden, I would feel a deep sense of shame and envy. Home grown vegetables were mocking me at every turn.
One day, I realized life had given me gardening lemons, and I needed to make lemonade. During a stroll through the yard, I optimistically realized that the parsley was doing quite well. Knowing that parsley likes some shade, this made sense. But even curious-er, the zucchini had grown, and while not actually prospering, had a substantial number of flowers.
I started to research which types of vegetables might grow in the shade.
Considering I do not have full-sun, I am quite lucky in that my little garden gets exactly four hours of sun a day, from 10:00 – 2:00. So, although it doesn’t receive full-sun, it does get the best sun of the day.
So, here is the chronicle of my adventures of gardening in the shade, or part-shade. It’s a radical idea, but I think it just might work.
Enjoy!
Ebinla
