OUR ORIGINS: Jenny’s Edibles and Blooms was and is a labor of love. It all started with the development of my own vegetable garden in Falmouth, MA. For years I inter-planted my vegetables in perennial beds and I struggled to carve out space for my crops. Ultimately I decided to do the site prep required to have a dedicated vegetable garden. We cleared a few trees to improve the light, leveled the grades and brought in some beautiful soil. This first garden was situated over a section of old gravel driveway — highly visible, situated between my parking area and the house. I walk by it each time I entered the house and it was perpetually visible from my kitchen window. Its location was ideal. It allowed for ease of harvest, constant enjoyment and was difficult to neglect.
In designing the garden, I spent countless hours at the local public library poring over design books for ideas. I was most intrigued and inspired by the traditional kitchen garden, known as a potager. Practical and beautiful. The end result of my days at the library, and hours with graph paper, is the 17 x 18 foot plot illustrated in the slide show below. There were eight raised beds ranging in sizes from 3′ x 3′, 4′ x 4′ to 3′ x 6′. Each site is unique. In that garden, the sizes maximized my planting area, allowed for ease of harvest/working the site, and was arranged in a thoughtful aesthetically pleasing way. I designed and built the beds by hand using Port Orford cedar. The fence enclosing the plot I also built and installed. It was made of Locust trees harvested off my property during the site preparation. At that site I employed the concepts of square foot and vertical gardening with trellises to maximize my yield.
During the winter months, I peruse seed catalogues. In addition to my favorites and some of the classics, I like to look for interesting and unique offerings not readily available at the local nursery. I grow the seeds on a grow-light stand, which I designed and built. It lives in my kitchen during the late winter and early spring, and brings me constant joy and hope as the winter months pass.
My intention initially was just to start enough seeds for my own garden. Invariably, I would have some extra seedlings that I couldn’t bear to compost and would give to friends. My seedlings were so well received, that I decided to scale things up the following year: More seedlings, broader clientele. And so was born Jenny’s Edibles and Blooms. Today our our hope is to offer unique, heirloom, high quality, organically grown edibles and ornamentals, and to enable you to localize your food source and enjoy the vegetable garden of your dreams.
