By: Fiona L. Mattson

Many of you saw our vertical garden at Ag Day and we’ve been taking care of it all summer long and into the fall. We initially had many different types of plants in the vertical garden such as tomatoes and sweet peppers, but early in the summer we decided to repot some of them to give them more space to grow, and added some additional plants in their place.

Verticial garden on Ag Day (March 19,2014)

In the vertical garden we added the herbs in place of where the tomatoes once were. We now have lavender, lemon thyme, oregano, sweet basil, cinnamon basil, lemon basil, pineapple sage, and bean plants. We also potted a jalapeno plant when were transferring all the tomato plants and sweet peppers.

Our Jalapeno pepper plant and our sweet pepper plants really took off this summer! As did our herbs that grew our vertical garden! We have been fortunate enough to harvest a great summer crop from the tomato plants and we have had a few little visitors along the way as well.

                        Praying mantis                      Garden Orb Weaver Spider        

                                        Dragon Fly                                                 

 Our garden became an inspiration for not only the staff at CDFA, but for school gardens and other types of urban gardens. We take care of this garden in an urban setting, right outside our office building, and it shows how you don’t have to have a lot of space in order to create something beautiful (and tasty) – anyone can plant a garden at their home, office, or school.  We have already posted about some of the school gardens sprouting up around California and are sure there will be more to come!