Baby greens and baby zucchini from our garden. We like 'em young.

I’m kind of obsessed with my vegetable garden. I walk through it every chance I get, peeking through the leaves to see how the zucchini are coming along, propping up the cucumber vines and cooing at the teeny little cucumbers now emerging, encouraging the okra to grow even though the odds are against them here in Oregon. I love knowing that with a little bit of effort I can feed my family fresh, organic vegetables straight from our garden. And the more the garden produces, the lower our food bill goes. We’re not fancy-cheese eaters. (In fact, we don’t eat much cheese at all. Plain yogurt, and milk for coffee and tea are pretty much the extent of our dairy consumption, unless there’s the occasional pizza involved.) The bulk of our grocery money goes for organic produce. A non-negotiable for us, particularly since we’re feeding a child. But with the garden there’s also the benefit of knowing EXACTLY where our food came from.

I don’t know about you, but that e coli spinach debacle a few years back put me off commercially grown spinach for a good long time, and I still won’t feed the stuff to the kid unless it’s cooked. The story that sticks with me from that particular scare? The mom who put pre-washed, bagged baby spinach into a smoothie for her nine-year-old, because he wouldn’t eat vegetables otherwise. And then the kid died. He died from eating spinach. That freaks me right the fuck out. How does that mom feel, knowing such an innocent, even loving, act led to her son’s death? Ugh. (But the state of our nation’s agriculture is a way bigger topic than I plan to tackle here.) What’s an admittedly anxious mom to do? Grow her own spinach, thanks.

Food safety and money-saving aside, you know what I really love about the garden? I love what it’s teaching the kid about food. His favorite snack right now is kale and string beans picked straight from the plant and eaten right there. He’ll stand next to a kale plant, pull off a leaf. Eat it. Pull off another. Eat it. Move on over to the bush beans, snack there a while. Then I’ll pick a zucchini for him (the leaves are too prickly for him to do it himself) and he’ll eat that straight from the plant. Watching him eat the first zucchini from the garden this year? That alone was worth all the effort, even if nothing else had grown at all.

The only way to eat the first zucchini of the summer: straight from the plant

When the kid is asleep and it’s too dark to see the plants, I read books about gardening. Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades. Four-Season Harvest. Winter Gardening in the Maritime Northwest. I’m determined that this year will be the beginning of getting the garden to feed us year-round. It’s fairly easy to garden all year here in the Pacific Northwest, but it’s apparently possible just about anywhere. Check out Four-Season Harvest, if you’re interested. It was written by a man who lives and gardens in Portland, Maine.

We have quite a small yard, but it gets decent light, and we’ve given a good chunk of it over to vegetables. Including in-ground beds, raised beds, and containers, we’ve got about 300 sq feet of garden out back. (That’s bigger than my studio apartment on St. Marks in my East Village years. Believe me, that’s not lost on me.) We’re lucky to have it. But if we didn’t have that space, I’d like to think we’d still manage to garden, if perhaps on a smaller scale.

I love walking around Portland and spying out the different solutions people have come up with to eek out space to grow vegetables. Despite the small-town feel, Portland is, after all, a city. Close in, the houses are on small city lots, crowded pretty tightly together. A lot of houses in inner SE Portland don’t have backyards at all. Sometimes just a tiny side yard, sometimes nothing. So it’s not just the apartment-building dwellers who have to get creative about the gardening space. You see tons of tomatoes in pots on balconies and fire escapes everywhere, and windowsill pots full of basil, which is great. But you also sometimes spot things like this:

Pole beans vining up twine on an inner SE Portland front porch.

Those pole beans are going to wind their way up that twine before too long. Whatever genius planted those beans is going to have fresh string beans all summer and into the fall, and will also have a cool, shady front porch full of bean vines. Big glossy green leaves, sweet little white bean blossoms, and then the beans themselves. It’s a brilliant use of a sunny porch.

You also see a lot of vegetable patches and raised beds planted in the parking strips:

Winter squash takes over a parking strip

If we still lived in Brooklyn, I’d be planting a garden on our roof, and maybe some windowboxes for herbs. In that tiny St. Marks studio of my single days, I would be crowding as many containers onto the fire escape as I could get away with, and maybe begging the landlord to let me have a small raised bed or a few more containers in the backyard.

So how about you? What creative garden-space solutions have you come up with?