Backyard Farming: My Little Backyard Farm

My name is Ian and I live in a small Suburban House in San Jose, CA with my wife and dog. I work in a high stress, high energy career that has nothing to do with gardening, organic and heirloom produce, or cooking. That is precisely why gardening and cooking are the things in my life that keep me going. As I have become somewhat of a gardening and cooking guru among my family, friends, and social circles, I figured why not start a Blog.

In San Jose we are blessed with mild weather year round, which actually allows me to garden four seasons a year. However, in San Jose land is at a premium (very expensive), so this year having mostly maxed out my garden space. I decided to go vertical and incorporate some more container gardening too.

Because, gardening is an ongoing process for me, and I am always sprouting something new, taking something out, transplanting something else, etc., my first post here will give you an overview of my gardening techniques and philosophies, and subsequent posts will go into more details about specific crops, how to grow them, and the funnest part: How to cook them!!!!!!!

I firmly stand for chemical free, non-GMO, open-pollinated gardening, and compost every scrap of organic matter that I can. My family's weekly garbage output can now fit in a 8 X 8 box, but I'd like to get that down to less.

Here is a picture of my winter squashes, tomatos, melons, and cucumbers on June 13:

There are actually a few leeks leftover form the fall in the middle too.

Here is the bed on July 11:

The squash plants are loaded with small to medium winter squashes, I'm harvesting cucumbers, and the tomatoes are loaded with green tomatoes (I check them every day for signs of ripening. It has been a cool summer here so far, so the plants are growing but fruits are ripening slowly.

Over the winter and into spring, I grew the bed of peas you see here. In the front are Sugar Snaps and in the back shelling peas. Knowing they would come out early summer, I inter-planted six summer squash plants down the center, 2 early crooknecks, 2 Cocozelle (Striped Heirloom Zucchini), and 2 Black Beauties about 15 inches aparts.

A few days after this photo, I took out the peas. Here are the squash plants today, yielding lots of squash:

So I planted Blue Hubbard squash on my side yard. These can supposedly grow a 20 - 40 pound squash. This is 2 plants about 4 feet aparts. As you can see, they have pretty much taken over the side of the house. I think it pretty cool: