Up until June of 2017, we lived in town.You do what you have to do ....live where the work is....For 30 years, give or take a few, we lived in a house in a nice, old, well established neighbourhood, in a nice little town. The big trees were nice, the privacy in the yard was nice...BUT....how to grow a garden when the very middle of the yard only got about 6 hours of sun a day, and the big black walnut trees around dropped their spent blossoms in the spring, nuts late summer, then the compound leaves in the fall, all with plant unfriendly juglone in them? With walnut trees come squirrels burying nuts. With towns come cats using your gardens as a litter box.
Well...you build a box, a raised box. You fill it with soil and squeeze all the plants in that you can. You encase it in hardware cloth, sides and top, until the plants grow and totally fill the space.You fill any container you can find with soil, then plant, sticking in sticks and spreading blood meal to deter the critters.
When the box rotted out, because of all the watering it needed, we built a 4' X 12' raised bed in its place with a sturdy fence for climbers at the back, then two more 4' X 9' beds right behind it. We brought in soil, and enriched it every year with all the compost I could make. Each spring, the invading roots from the surrounding trees had to be dug out. I unhappily knew that my plants did not live up to what they could be, if they'd had enough sun, but we made do, and did harvest good food from all those boxes, pots, barrels and beds.
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