One of my many goals in life is to someday raise all my own food for my family, vegetables and meat both, or at least as much as I can. I really don’t see olive trees growing in Fairbanks anytime soon but, hey you never know. In the meantime, I try not to be too hard on myself when I can’t raise the perfect garden that allows me to save enough food for the whole year. So in the spirit that these blogs are all written about which is, ‘do what you can when you can’, I’d like to share my gardening technique. I call it the Casual Garden or a.k.a the Browsing Garden. My goal with my current garden is not to can, freeze, or ferment enough food for the whole year, I just can’t make it happen at this point in my life. But instead, I raise food that my family can walk by and browse whenever they want. Fresh, in-season food that can be picked and eaten at any time by anyone.
Good food that is good for you. Let me give you an example of why I chose this gardening technique. I love peas, fresh peas, uncooked shelling peas, I eat them, pod and all. I remember camping in the backyard as a kid with my sister Jessica, no tent, no camping pads, just a sleeping bag and a pillow. We brush our teeth, say goodnight to our parents, and head outside. We’d then immediately raid the garden and eat all the peas and bush beans we could get our hands on, berries too if they were ripe. I’m sure our parents knew but they never stopped us. That’s what I want for my family, good food and memories.
Browsing on the raspberries.
And….., I think my browsing garden idea is working. In the summer I hear daily from my kids, ‘ Can I go eat the raspberries/peas/beans/carrots, etc’. The answer I always give is ‘YES’! Then there is a small stampede towards the garden. We also eat salads almost every night. I’m not going to lie, I don’t really want to cook anything complicated in the summer, I’d rather be outside doing almost anything than be inside when the sun is out. Consequently, we eat a lot of salads in my house. Kale salad, lettuce salad, beet green salads, and throw hard boiled eggs, salmon, or even moose steak on top. Barbeque rabbit, anyone? And here is the great part, my kids like salad. They don’t complain when they eat it and my daughter actually squeals in happiness. I must be doing something right.
I have a family of 5, my husband, myself, a 6-year-old and two 4-year-olds, so this is what I grow in my browsing garden, currently.
- Raspberries – 1 row 3×10′ long.
- Peas – 1 row 12′ long
- Carrots – a 3×3′ patch
- Lettuce – mixed, ~4×1′ row
- Kale – 8 plants
- Mint – 2 plants, the kids just like the leaves, and for me, mojitos
- Majoram – 1 plant for salad dressings
- Thyme – 1 plant for salad dressings and pizza sauce
- Chives – 1 plant, easy to grow, I add it to dressings
- Beets – ~ 3×3′ patch, mostly I just grow greens, I need to work on growing good roots.
- Rhubarb – 11 plants
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I also grow some potatoes, not too impressively though. And I like to grow tomatoes in a really thrown together greenhouse, and sometimes I even get some ripe tomatoes out of it. Every year I also like to try something new such as radishes, turnips, kohlrabi, or broccoli. I don’t take it too seriously and if I get some food out of it great, it’s a bonus. Otherwise, I just make sure and involve my kids in the planting and harvesting to get them interested in gardening. This year I am trying turnips and onions both, we’ll see how it goes.
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Thinned carrots, fresh for the eating.
So that’s what I’m growing this year. Next year, who knows, maybe I’ll ask my kids what they want to browse on the most. What do your kids like to eat out of the garden? If anybody has any good ideas they’d like to throw my way for next year’s browsing garden, I’m all ears.
