Kitchen Gardens

Harvest at Home provides full-service, organic gardening at your home. We do all the work, you enjoy the food.

Planting

One of the services we provide is to help you decide what to plant. When you shop for produce at a grocery store, there are standard varieties of foods you see again and again. However, because we plant crops from seed specifically for you, your choices of open-pollinated, heirloom vegetables and herbs are practically unlimited.

Intensive Planting

To maximize bed space, we plant crops in a staggered or triangular pattern. This not only allows more plants per area, but also enables the plants to form a living mulch over the soil, keeping in moisture and shading out weeds. Additionally, whenever possible, we start seedlings in flats so that more garden space is available to larger, more mature plants.

Soil Management

A big part of a healthy and sustainable garden is good soil.  To ensure soil health, we use a double-digging method in which we till the bed to a depth of 24 inches. The soil then has greater drainage and aeration, which allows the roots to grow much deeper and reach more nutrients. We will normally achieve this by filling decorative beds with new soil/compost in addition to digging into the existing soil.

Another way to maintain and improve your soil is to compost. We will manage your soil health using compost produced from your garden as the primary soil amendment whenever possible.

Irrigation

We install drip systems on automatic timers to limit water consumption and encourage maximum growth. We can also set up rain waiter collection to maximize garden sustainability.

Pest Control

We use a number of organic techniques to control unwanted insects and animals:

• We can install physical barriers such as “gopher screens” to stop pests from digging under beds. To keep out larger animals we can install deer fences.
• We control weeds naturally by planting crops close together to create a living mulch. We remove remaining weeds by hand.
• We encourage planting a variety of herbs, which insects don’t like. This discourages unwanted insects by providing negative feedback. The more unpleasant options they encounter, the more likely they will find the garden inhospitable.
• Healthy soil produces healthy plants, which discourages pest infestation. Most insects look for plants that are sick to infest. They are less likely to infest a healthy plant in healthy soil.