What Is A Garden?

What is a garden? That is an excellent question that is not so simple to answer. A garden can be multiple things to multiple people. It could be something as simple as a couple of pots on your patio to a full blown commercial farm with acres and rows of product. I would not say that my definition of a garden and what I am trying to accomplish falls into any one particular category or genre. I am somewhat limited in scope by my small urban lot but not necessarily limited by my imagination. I know what my garden is not more than I know what it actually is. My garden is not traditional. It does not fit into what is currently considered the mainstream but it is growing in acceptance. I know that what I plant must provide me with something. If I am going to take care of it then it must in return take care of me. This means lots of herbs, fruits, and vegetables. The problem is how do I integrate these types of helpful plants into a traditional urban landscape with a limited area? Lets start small, work with what I have and see where this goes. It was around this time that I became familiar with a book by Mel  Bartholomew called "All New Square Foot Gardening". This is a great book and I recommend it for anyone who is limited on space and wants to create a vegetable garden. Basically Mel was an engineer who's daily job was to streamline processes. Once he retired he applied these same streamlining principles to vegetable gardening. Long story short he removed all the unnecessary space from the vegetable garden and reduced it to only the necessary parts. What this results in is a way to grow lots of vegetables in a small about of space. This would be what I used for my first "garden".