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Organic Vegetable GardenOne of the great joys of this first summer in our new solar house has been a twentyby twenty foot square vegetable garden. In early spring we got my parents out forthe weekend, leveled out the area in preparation for a load of top soil from our localgarden center. We picked a spot that is protected on the north and east sides bytrees. In addition, it is sheltered by the house to the north and west sides. The areagets full sunlight all day. We chose twenty or so packages of se eds from our localorganic supermarket, Harmony Market. We erected a fence with the leftoverchicken wire from the straw bale construction on the house.One of the back to the country books we purchased years ago gave us the idea tocreate growing beds about two feed wide, with walking paths around a foot wide.We also left a foot around the edges. Then we simply read the seed packages aplanted as directed once the chance of frost was gone. We even got a bag ofplanting potatoes and put them in around the outside of the vegetable garden. Overabout a months period we planted romaine lettuce seeds, beans, peas, carrots,tomatoes, peppers, onions, mescaline lettuce and of course the potatoes. The kidshelped us plant the seeds more often than not. Some books suggested planting theseeds in a more random pattern. We tried both at different times.Leigh put leftover straw bale along the paths between the beds. This reduced thenumber of weeds early on but eventually weeds grow no matter what. We waitedand finally some shoots came up. First, we started to enjoy some fabulous mescalinemixed green salads which in fact lasted most of the summer and even into the fall.We found it wonderful with a simple dressi ng of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, andpepper along with some pine nuts. Or for some variety we stole the idea of mixingin organic goats cheese and a raspberry vinaigrette with some walnut slivers, fromone our favorite local restaur ants Hiding in Hockley.Then later in the summer the beans and peas became a daily fresh vegetable withmost meals. The romaine lettuce was smaller than the grocery species with a lighterleaf, still excellent for a Caesar salad. We battled the bugs with our fingers since wewill not use pesticides. The potatoes were wonderful plants, popping dark greenleaves that were always under attack from the potato beetle that wed been warnedabout. Sadly, the potatoes died while we were on vacation during the first two weeksof July despite our attempts to keep them happy with straw bale supplements undertheir leaves. Having returned from our vacation and hoping to be able to startenjoying our potatoes their demise was taken quite hard as we cou ldnt understand276