Hi From The Toronto Area

Hello! I'm a novice gardener, and SFG was pretty much my intro to gardening a number of years ago, living in a different home. Back there, I had lots of space but it was too shady to do much vegetable gardening (I'm not really interested in growing flowers.) Now, I have some direct sun, but the space is tiny. Most of my space is shade. I'm facing NE, and the sunny spot is against the fence. Needless to say, I grow a lot vertically. 

Here are a few pics:

Aug 7, 2016



Containers on the side. These get mostly morning/early afternoon sun. The height from the containers buys them some extra sun time. This was 1 week post-transplanting (May 29, 2016)



...and here they are August 7: 



I'm limited in my ability to do true SFGing Mel's way, as I'm limited in what I can buy for the garden. I live near a little hardware store, but they don't even sell vermiculite. Luckily, my soil seems pretty good. 

I also won't be building boxes any time soon. I did, however, smuggle home a bunch of patio stones that the store discarded. They dump stuff like that way in the back of the parking lot, which I walk through on my way to work, anyway. Three trips with a luggage cart and a sore back later, I had a nice little wall.  

This year, I want to find some discarded blinds or something to get proper markers. I've just been eyeballing it, and of course, I plant too much too close together. Nonetheless, I got a pretty impressive harvest: 30 pickling sized cukes, over 30 lbs of tomatoes, almost 5 lbs bell peppers, 5 lbs zucchini, a head of cabbage, a 9-lb pumpkin, plus some other odds and ends. Pretty good considering I half-arse it. 

Thanks for a great site!

A very warm welcome kjay from snowy Ottawa.   

Looks like you have a lot of good things going on.  

Kjay,  Welcome to the Forum from California!  

I also gained some sun when I elevated the beds off the ground and turned them into table tops.

  and   from way northern California.

Hi KJ!

Nice harvest! You really do have good soil.

For markers, before the discarded blinds came along, I collected used plastic utensils from the office, ran them through the dishwasher and wrote on them. Works great!

Keep those photos coming. We love them!

CC