Reasons why......

....you might be hesitant to get started gardening and my personal solution/rebuttal:

1. " I live in an apartment", "I have only a small backyard"

solution(s)- Container gardening. I've seen people use everything from actual flower pots, to coffee cans, to buckets, and even cheap plastic storage tubs from Walmart.
You can grow an entire salad garden on your window sill or in a pot on your back porch. Dwarf varieties of carrots grow well this way. So do herbs.


2. " I don't have time for that kind of thing."

rebuttal- Yes you do. The first year I gardened, all I did was put some seeds in the ground and water occasionally. I purposely chose easy care plants and kept it all low key so I would not get overwhelmed. It is only as hard as you make it!


3. " Look at my thumb. It's black! I'll kill all the plants."

rebuttal- There is no such thing as having a green thumb or a black thumb. If you want something badly enough- YOU CAN DO IT!

4. " Isn't gardening an expensive hobby?"

rebuttal- Again, it's only as expensive as you make it. Buy seeds once. After that, let some of your plants go to seed, collect those and plant them next year. If you save your own, you won't have to continually buy them.

Also, get your hands on the current issue of Backwoods Home Magazine. They have the cheapest, most innovative garden ideas. It isn't necessary to buy a ton of gadgets to have a good garden.

5." Gardening is for women, or old people. "

rebuttal- Not anymore. Although many of us have nostalgic memories of Grandma's kitchen garden, today's gardeners are of every age, social/economic strata and walk of life. They have discovered what others already know: gardening is fun and rewarding.

6. "My neighbors will complain about my garden"

rebuttal- Because my backyard is all shade, my garden is in my front yard closest to the street. I live in a nice neighborhood and feared complaints. My neighbors LOVE looking at our veggies. They have had nothing but nice things to say about it. Just keep your space clean and attractive.


If you have any other concerns or questions, ask me. If I don't have the answer, I will go find it.

hugs,
-E

Your front yard "gourmet grocery store"

Listen, anyone can grow fresh gourmet veggies. And there is very good reason to do so. Have you looked at the price of snow peas and sugar peas in the grocery store? $4-$6 dollars a pound!!

Here is another compelling reason to 'grow your own': Convenience. It's no secret that I love to cook. And it's frustrating to continually run to the store for every little thing. Especially fresh herbs. You pay $2 for half wilted basil that you only use a portion of . The rest turns black before you find another recipe.

Meal planning also becomes easier. I can stroll out to garden and see what is currently ready to pick and plan accordingly. In early spring it is usually just a green salad with a few fresh herbs tossed in. As the season continues, I can add spinach, radishes, and peas. Soon I'm planning meals around broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, new potatoes, zucchini, and yellow squash.

The sad truth is our economy sucks right now. And our pantry is showing the sign-of-the-times. The end of each month is often quite lean for us.

Yesterday I opened our fridge to look for a veggie for dinner. There was only a sad, old bunch of celery in the crisper. "Not salad again", I thought to myself.

Out to garden I went. And guess what? After 10 minutes of careful fussing and picking, I was able to get enough sugar snap peas to saute' for dinner for a family of six. No driving, no shopping, no money spent.

Tomorrow I'm going to address stumbling blocks to starting your own garden. Most gardening challenges are easily overcome. So do not fear!

Then we'll talk about some simple easy preparations of garden veggies. As side-dishes, soups, and even main meals.

Many friends have commented that we eat well at my house. You can do the same at yours! Stay tuned..........

summer dialogue

Peas hang abundantly like clusters of grapes on the vine. Our cat Aphrodite becomes "Mighty Huntress". She lurks in the green of the garden, imagining herself to be pleasantly dangerous. Bean,the kitten, pounces on her. She cuffs him angrily, her cover blown.

Hummingbirds congregate at the back porch feeder- the animal kingdom's water cooler. Grr, our largest cat, chitters with anxious desire. He longs to catch them.

I grow tired of the kitchen. The cooking, the dishes, the counters, the floors- all of it. So I take Dante' and Maxwell camping.

Forty-five minutes to freedom. Our campsite is spacious, the largest I have seen. Three tents or more could fill the open spaces. But we don't need a tent today. We are staying in the yurt. It has three beds, two tables, chairs, a lamp and a heater. Very luxurious camping indeed.

I feel better at once. All the best sights, sounds, tastes, and smells are here. The vibrant crackling of campfires, the laughter of children, the chirping of birds in the massive evergreens that loom above our personal haven.

A quick, black crow announces our arrival. Be careful, I tell the children. They will eat everything you turn your back on. That night we lick the remains of burnt marshmallow from our sticky fingers. Maxwell and Dante' are impossibly beautiful by firelight.

We fall asleep beneath the canopy view of the yurt's dome. The last sound I hear is the low droning of grown-ups who talk carefully around the campfire while their children sleep.

Mid-season garden update

I absolutely love this time of year. The garden really starts to pay off in June and July. We have more lovely salad greens than I know what to do with. The peas are getting quite prolific, lovely dark green heads of broccoli are appearing. Veggie Paradise!

Something new we tried this year was potatoes and boy was it worth it! 10 Yukon gold starts have yielded more gorgeous spuds than I ever thought possible. They are so large the ground above the plants is crumbling as they burst through. It is so much fun to dig into the ground and find large new-skinned potatoes just lying around like rich women on lawn chairs!

The spinach is all gone now. It got fairly large but bolted too quickly and began to gather powdery mold due to all the rain. I had to run outside and pull it up all at once to save it. In it's place I've planted a multi-colored carrot mix. The package promises purple, white and red carrots. If they really turn out, that is going to look so cool! We have a juicer and I want to drink some purple carrot juice.

Ahhh, soybeans. Such enigmatic little plants. I fear our climate gets too much rain and too little heat for them. But they shyly hold their own. I really have high hopes for them.

Also new this year: exotic radishes. Why radishes? I just don't know. Max likes them, they are easy to grow, and there are some wicked cool varieties available. We planted these monster sized red radishes that looked just like carrots. They were pretty nifty. But check this out, I just planted some variety of Black radishes. And since we are big lovers of Japanese food, Daikon radish has been planted as well. More on that later.

Also new, the herb garden. The unused space just outside the front door under the eaves is our new herb garden location. Up and running are Borage, Cilantro, Sage,Mint, Chamomile, Parsley,Rosemary and Marjoram. The Thyme is dead. What is it about Thyme? It always dies! Is there some Thyme god I need to sacrifice to , to get this stuff to grow?

Newly planted herbs include Lemon Balm, Coriander and, ummmmm..... shoot I forgot. Something else.

On the far end of the herb garden Is a new wooden trellis I added specifically for growing climbing beans. The particular variety we are growing this year are bright red. The pretty vines are winding themselves up the trellis and climbing higher each day. One of the vines has wound itself around a sunflower. Yes, that's right. Sunflower.

All those years I lived in Kansas and never grew the dang things. Now I have three of them in my front yard! It happened because we use our rabbit compost in the garden. The rabbits eat a mix of grain and seeds, i.e. sunflower seeds. A few of them sprouted and I am letting them do their thing out of sheer curiosity.

Also new this year strawberry plants in large flower garden and baby's breath growing around the mailbox. Whew! I'm almost as tired typing this as I was doing all that work. Thank goodness Dante' is such a good helper. :)

Confessions of a Face Book Junkie

My posts to this blog have been more and more infrequent lately. Some friends turned me onto Face Book and it has been occupying way too much of my time.

Call it and addiction, call it what you want- I think for me it just became a "reality avoidance" hobby, LOL :)

Another factor has been the flakiness of my camera.

To combat my writer's block and laziness, I am publicly vowing to post to Eating Oregon every day for a week. Now that I have said it, it will have to be done.

Wish me luck,
-E

Part II

Day Tripping part I

Although these pictures appear totally unrelated, they were taken during an afternoon outing. We drove about an hour to a small , rural town. Much smaller and vastly more rural than our own.

In just one day we encountered such a diversity of life it was amazing. I can't do it justice in just one posting so here is part I:





pic 1- Dante' and Rex by the river. Note the greenness of the water.

pic 2- An utterly gorgeous bloodhound sits watchfully on his porch.

pic 3- Max on the 'upside' of a teeter-totter.