Edible Landscaping in Hamilton

There are a number of stories of recent university grads who can't find work and who have decided to "give Hamilton a try".  By that I mean people who are creative, entrepreneurial, ambitious, and want to take advantage of the cheap rents and unsaturated creative sector in Hamilton.  Moving to Hamilton to find work (or to make work), for some, is a way of avoiding the over-saturated markets of university grads who can only find jobs paying minimum wage elsewhere.  Essentially, this was the approach that I took a year and a half ago when I moved back to Hamilton after being away for 8 years.

Here's an article that popped up in The Spec today about a couple of people who have started up a small business this season.  Their mission is to make money building vegetable gardens in peoples' backyards.

I'm excited to see how successful their first season will be.  The only other (I think..?) edible landscaping company or social enterprise based off of principles of food security in Hamilton is Backyard Harvest.  They are only a few years old.  Some people say Hamilton doesn't have the market for these types of smaller businesses.  Others say Hamilton is "ripe" (..) with opportunity.

This season will tell.

April is the Month for Container Gardens

This was my second experiment in building container gardens.  I finished it this afternoon.  I built the last one out of reclaimed wood (resourceful and cheap, yet not as quality) so for this one I spent a bit of cash and made it out of cedar with a bit of pine.  It was worth it.

Aside from the harvest, the best part about using these things to grow vegetables in is that they allow us to use otherwise unusable land.  Whether this unusable land is a concrete pad in a suburban backyard, or contaminated / gravel-heavy soil in an inner-city backyard, container gardens allow us to reclaim previously unusable land to grow food on.

They also look really cool.

Apart from also looking really cool, container gardens are easier to maintain than most other types of gardens as the soil beneath the container (if applicable) and the soil inside of the container is separated by wood and geotextile (also patio stones, in this case).  This means that there is minimal time spent picking weeds out of container gardens.  Also, they don't require as much bending over, so our backs don't get bent out of shape by maintenance or harvest.

In southern Ontario, container gardens are a practical and efficient way of growing tomatoes, leafy greens and herbs.

I've started germinating a bunch of seeds sow in a few weeks time I'll be planting tomatoes, basil, spinach an perhaps a sunflower or two in this 8X2X1 container.

If you're in the Hamilton area, let me know if you want one built in the next couple of weeks and we can talk about what dimensions you want, what seeds germinated and we can negotiate a price!  289 426 5657.  Really cool.