Growing Paleo Vegetables

I am an avid vegetable gardener, not an especially successful or experienced one, mind you, but I sure like it a lot. Since the Paleo diet is all about eating the best food possible for one's body, I figure it makes sense to grow as much of our food as is practical in as natural a way as possible -- and blog about it, of course. My posts on gardening are not intended to impress anyone. I simply want to share the techniques I use and the lessons I learn along the way. I promise that some of these lessons will be as funny as cultivating non-intelligent life forms can be.

If you have done much reading about gardening, you'll find there are all sorts of different approaches with fancy names. Asking which method is the best invites debate as intense and as pointless as the Browser Wars. No method promises your patio will surpass the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. I've never been much for adhering to any kind of "ism," so I take pieces from lots of methods and mix them as I see fit.

Here's how I started.

In February 2008 I decided that I needed yet another hobby and vegetable gardening would fill the bill. After weeks of planning, measuring and discussion with Crystal and the kids, I settled on an L-shaped raised bed in the southeast corner of our back yard. Here's a diagram of the plot:

I'll do a separate post later giving the details on how I went about putting it in, but I will share one little tip right now: allow enough space between the raised bed and the fence to get a lawn mower between them. I sure wish I had. Even with the proper equipment, a 120 square foot raised bed is a lot of work to put in:



Five years ago, the soil in my area was a cotton field. Today it is a sandy black clay as hard as concrete when it is dry -- not ideal for most vegetables -- so I have been working on improving it. The first year I mixed it with sandy loam which I ordered from a local dirt merchant. That year's garden was unexciting. Last year I mixed in a whole bunch of peat moss and my favorite natural fertilizer with pretty good results, at least for the tomatoes.


This year I've added a tremendous amount of home-made compost. I have high hopes for the rest of our Paleo feast!