Most people go looking for a house and end up with a garden. Jewel Foster went looking for a garden and the house was an afterthought.

She had a long skinny garden in the North End and wanted more room.

"I went looking for a place to garden."

Foster studied a city map and saw that one side of one block of Beulah Avenue in the southwest had double-length lots and an alley where a parallel street would normally continue. She couldn't see anything of the back yards from the street, so she cautiously took her car up the alley, eventually standing on it to get a look over fences.

She laughs about it now, but a serious garden came out of her search.

She and husband Ted Haines have owned the property since 1984, and the garden has nourished the family -- they have two grown children, Thea and Gabriel -- in a very literal sense. The garden has provided large amounts of food for the family for most of those 25 years.

In her listing for Hamilton Spectator Open Garden Week in June, Foster wrote: "A kitchen garden with perennial borders and old-fashioned roses."

But a visitor expecting some tomatoes and a few herbs is taken aback by what Foster and Haines have made.

Tomatoes, yes. And tomatillos, strawberries, raspberries, elderberries, asparagus, peppers, eggplant, beans, rhubarb, garlic, beets. Lemons and limes fruiting in pots, and a small fig tree. Radish, lettuce and peas have all come and gone. Basil and sorrel, lavender and thyme, tarragon and celeriac, chives and their garlic cousin.

"It was bigger, but it was for four of us and now it's 2 1/2," Foster says. (Thea splits her time between Hamilton and Toronto.)

She used to grow onions, potatoes and broccoli, but now they buy them from a farm.

"I used to grow corn. I don't anymore. In the daytime it was the squirrels and at night the raccoons would come and finish it off. We were lucky to get any corn at all."

The garden comes naturally to them -- and vice versa.

"I'm not that far removed from the farm," she says. My grandparents' farm was in Lynden. My husband grew up on a farm, and it always made sense to us to grow what you eat."

She doesn't preserve or freeze much.

"We eat seasonally. In the winter, we eat root vegetables, and I have a cold cellar."

Foster says the trick to growing vegetables for a family is to know how much you can grow of something "without everyone getting totally sick of it."

The garden is a balanced mix of edible and ornamental. A lovely porch stretches across the back of the house, and they have a semi-formal arrangement of flower beds and a square patch of grass, framed by pavers, around a handsome silver birch they planted. Down the depth of the garden -- Foster figures the back is about 130 feet deep by 55 deep -- wide perennial borders have evolved from former vegetable beds. (The centre of the back garden -- the largest area -- remains almost entirely edibles.)

Black-eyed Susan (rudbeckia) is blooming, and Brilliant sedum, a compact variety with hot-pink flowers above bright lime-green leaves, looks fabulous even in the rain.

Large clumps of ornamental grasses give a sort of architectural majesty to the garden. The most extraordinary is Ravenna grass (Erianthus ravennae), at 12 feet. Its thick purple-and-green stems form a dramatic contrast against the delicate foliage of asparagus.

Old roses are mostly showing their red and orange hips now, but one, Rosa chinensis Mutabilis is still in flower -- and one of Foster's favourites.

"The buds are orange, open to yellow flowers that age to soft pink and then deep pink."

Closest to the house is a massive wisteria with thick stems that have braided themselves into an intricate tangle. Foster says the flowers this year were "so fabulous."

"My mother planted it the year we got here, and that's why it does so well. She had a green thumb."

She says looking after the garden is almost a full-time job.

"For me, 'garden' is a verb. My favourite thing is to redo a bed. I love that. But I'm an incidental weeder."

She makes time to enjoy the garden.

"I always sit out here," she says of the deep back porch. "We live out here in the summer."

Rob Howard lives and gardens in Hamilton. gardenwriter@gmail.com