Posted on 2008-10-09 16:00:00
Tags: Food, Project VP
It has been six months ago since I added Google Ads to my weblog and to my FreeBSD Mailinglist Archive and this month I received my first payment. Six months for US$ 100.-, that is about AU$ 130.-. Not enough to give up my dayjob, that's for sure, but enough for funny things. And the funny thing-du-jour is: Growing your own vegetables.
Wait... Computers, networks, electronics, children. How does that fit in? Euhmm... category children I would say. Nothing is as fun as doing funny things with them and working in the garden is one of them.
When I was young, my parents had a so called volkstuin, or allotment garden in the English language, were they grew vegetables. Not for the whole year around and not for the whole family, just a 10 by 10 meters lot. A lot of saturday mornings were spent there weeding the growth and in the summer with the late nights I often helped watering them.
So, how does 130 Australian dollars and vegetable patches come together? Simple: I used the money to buy some gardening tools and seeds.
Project Vegetable Patch has started its first phase, with the purchase of a spade and the turning over a square meter of grass in the back of the garden. The grass in the back of the garden is a little bit high, and very strong. So I limited myself to one square meter. Much less than my father did, but you have to start somewhere. The ground looked fine, it was wet and full of worms, lawn grubs (are lawn grubs a good sign?) and stones.
I bought pumpkin seeds and carrot seeds. The pumpkin needed to be sowed one meter apart, so they go on the edge-corners of the patch. And the carrots rows have to be 20-30 cm in between so I got three rows of them.
Add a little bit of water, add a little bit of worm-wee from the worm farm and wait for four months. Well, check every week to get rid of the grasses and to water it every day, but the idea is there.
If this works, next time I will go for more square meters!