Disappearing Front Yard Garden

In October 2008, I spotted this raised bed, growing tomatoes and other vegetables, in front of what I like to describe as a "cottage" type house. I created blogs of this garden on January 16 and 31, 2009.

The snows of December 2008 and January 2009 buried the garden, but the winter cover crop was peeking out.


The cover crop was lush in late March 2009.

By mid May 2009 good-sized tomato plants had been installed at the back of the plot, under wire "cages".

Unfortunately, I did not observe this garden later in the summer of 2009, but this is what I found in February 2010:



The entire raised bed with its soil had been carted off! The red marks on the sidewalk and the IPR marker (RIP?) indicate that the cottage is being slated for demolition, the fate of many such cottages in this area of the city where the value of a lot is $1M. Do you think that the front yard of the new house will grow vegetables? Let's hope that all that fertile soil went to a good home.

Hidden Dunbar Street Gardens

There is more traffic on Dunbar Street each year, so residents often use tall hedges and fences to muffle the noise. Brazenly peeking over fences or around hedges, I discovered three more front-yard gardens. This photo was taken in late August and shows a corner lot surrounded by a lovely brick and metal fence/wall with a small border vegetable garden. Near the car's red tail light, a bright red tomato can be seen (especially if you click on the photo to enlarge it), and a cucumber and a squash plant also soak up the heat from the bricks, which are exposed to the sun much of the day.

The following two photos are of one garden, the first photo taken in August, the second in February. The winter shot allows us to see the structure of the beds. The ones in foreground made with landscape logs are carefully constructed to provide a level planting area. The ones in the background are unusually high raised beds, perhaps to catch a bit of extra sun. All in all, an intensive use of a small area.


This third discovery is also a corner garden, bordered on Dunbar Street by the tall hedge in the right of the photo. It was only possible to view this garden from the side street. This larger lot allows 4 large raised beds, hard to see on the photo because I could not obtain a view from higher up. How many more vegetable gardens are there in front yards on Dunbar Street but impossible to see because of the hedges?