When someone has a modestly sized yard in town and they have to choose between having a garden and having a lawn, and they hate mowing lawn and love gardening, the idea of dedicating almost every square foot of lawn space into productive ground seems like a no-brainer once you get past the implicit expectation of houses being surrounded by grass.
Devon and Donna Jorundson are one such couple who did away with most of their lawn in favour of vegetable and fruit plants, even including their entire front lawn on their side of the sidewalk.
“I’m retired and I had time on my hands,” said Devon Jorundson, regarding the main reason why he decided to do this. “I like my own organic vegetables. And, in a small little space like this, I don’t have room for a lawn and a garden.”
He added that he is still not completed the garden takeover on his modest town property in Swan River, even though most of the square footage is enveloped in productive and nutritious plants, or the systems that support those plants, such as an extensive irrigation system that harvests as much rainwater as possible, or a couple of greenhouse structures that are utilized to extend the growing season and enables Jorundsons to have fresh vegetables much later than most other home gardens.
It took Jorundson approximately 10 years to build up his garden to where it currently is. His yard sports a variety of tomato plants, fruit trees, asparagus, garlic, onions, sunflowers, strawberries, lettuce, squash, swiss chard and more, much of which he harvests seeds from to plant and nurture future generations for free.
Another part of the reason that Jorundson wanted to grow a self-sustaining garden is because of the large amount of leafy greens that he eats.
“My doctor told me I had Type 2 Diabetes and put me on a low-carb keto diet,” he said. “Part of that is eating leafy greens. You can buy it in the store but it’s too expensive.
“I start (seeds) in the house and can start eating out of the garden by the second week of May, and I can eat the produce from the garden after freeze up when I pull it and put into my fridges well into the end of December for all my leafy greens.
“I’ve learned how to do things so it doesn’t overwhelm me,” Jorundson. “I used to do a whole bed of just swiss chard, but then when it came time to process that, you have to blanche it and freeze it. That might take two days of doing that. So now I’ll plant four feet and in another month do another four feet. I find four feet to be perfect. I can eat it while it’s green and when it gets to a certain point, I cut it out, turn it over and get the bed ready for next season.”
Jorundson’s garden also involves a no-till approach and plenty of ground cloth and cover on top of the soil so weeds are a relatively minimal nuisance.
“I used to spend 45 minutes per bed throughout the season weeding,” he said. “Now I’m probably down to 15 minutes per bed per season.”
Part of the ground cover includes wood chips, which Jorundsons picked up from a toppled truck that was carrying them while up in Flin Flon where they own another property and tend another garden.
One part of his garden that Jorundson doesn’t get to enjoy very often are his apple trees, even though apples are among his favourite foods.
“My doctor got me on low-carb and there’s an amazing amount of drugs I don’t take anymore,” he said. “One of the first things she asked me is what I like to eat. I said apples, but there is too much sugar in apples. I spent six years planting apples in my backyard and I was told I couldn’t have them.
“(The compromise was) that I get my blood sugars down, and as long as the apples are seasonal and are ripe on the tree, I can have an apple a day. When they are no longer ripe or on the tree, I stop eating apples until next year.”
Next time you drive down Seventh Street North in Swan River across from the Legion Park, keep an eye out for the wonderful example of self-sustainability in an urban setting.