During the Master Gardener Volunteer training course, each participant completes a Community Action Project, their first act of service in their new role. This post is Michele’s project, and hopefully the first of many Fruition posts from her and her cohort!
Gardening has always been a part of my life in one way or another. As a child I was fascinated by my grandfather’s terraced garden on the hill behind his house in Pennsylvania. It was bursting with vegetables and some flowers and to me it was magical.
Fast forward to my first garden as an adult. Vegetables were planted in straight rows, on their own, each vegetable in a designated area. Flowers and shrubs in a separate area. I recalled my dad telling me about a friend who had a tiny veggie garden at their campsite, where there were always some flowers planted with the veggies “to keep his vegetables happy.” Flowers certainly make me happy and growing my own veggies gives me joy also, so I began to research companion planting.
That was like opening a can of worms – so many complicated lists and dos and don’ts and conflicting views, so I decided to try my own version of “companion” planting. I began with putting in a small cottage style garden full of self seeding flowers, hollyhocks, poppies, rudbeckia, bachelor buttons.
Then my husband built raised beds for me to help make my gardening more manageable. I try to put at least one herb, one type of flower and one or more veggies in each raised bed. I always surround my tomatoes with two or more varieties of basil; they look so pretty together and they are delicious! Now tomatoes are my favorite thing to grow in the summer vegetable garden.
