Extending my growing space

Yesterday I harvested a handful of sugar snap peas and had them for a snack. I am far away from being able to have enough food for my family, though it is getting better step by step.

In order to grow more, I do need growing surface and I need crops that go beyond salad.

When I started with my first garden bed in 2014.
I just had very few stuff growing, but two zucchini plants gave me loads of food. The following year I got many plastic containers from a local store for free (their flowers come in there and they are usually thrown away). In 2015 I also built another small gardenbed. From the beginning I always had one issue: where to get the soil from ... (this shall be another topic for a blog)

Until 2018 I went ahead with pots, substituting the buckets/pots from the shop that broke after one year with other pots that withstand the sun. I have some really big ones for raspberries and other trees, but still they are too small. We are not really allowed to plant trees here - well, we will try to change that, because of course we will have better yields then and the trees and bushes will be healthier. I also cannot fill the whole space with garden beds, so I must change things bit by bit. Should it be necessary: additional beds can be built really fast.

I also have some hanging pots, mainly with nasturtium, which is fine for salad and at the same time it is said to be a fairly strong antibiotics and we have a number of hanging flower pots that for now will hold flowers :-)

This year I bought "cubic" containers, because space usage will be maximized - more soil on the same surface - and I started to pile up my containers in order to have even more growing space.

Then I built a no-bed garden bed :-D that is I simply layed potatoes on the soil and covered it with what I had: grass cuttings. And now I am curious what comes out of this experiment.

And the last bit to show you today is my bean-trellis that is just a garden fence. I will add long sticks, when the beans will have grown a bit more :-) This was a dead place of maybe a hand width where I put some wooden pieces my husband had made for something else which we then did not need :-) well I needed them here - obviously that was the "real" reason for making them ;-) - never be sad about work done that seems to be useless ... it will for sure get a different life.

The next steps to extend growing space is planned for 2020: the flat beds I have now will become hills and by that even more growing surface will be available.

Why I am showing you this? Well, it shows that a garden is not built at once, but bit by bit, in particular if it is small, one will always make changes to even better use each angle.

Whenever I add something to my garden or change something in terms of growing space, you will find it under "extend growing space".

You can find a group of people caring about some level of self sufficiency on MeWe:
https://mewe.com/join/stepstoself-sufficiency

And you can find pictures from my garden, some harvest and the "almost daily apple-tree picture" on Instagram (please note that often I upload the garden overviews + the apple tree pictures once a week or so, while I add other stuff on the go).
https://www.instagram.com/stepstoselfsufficiency/