The Garden

For Valentine's Day, a side trip to another of my passions: the veggie garden. When one has children with a marked sensitivity to food additives, like high fructose corn syrup (and processed sugars in general) and artificial food colorings, one learns quite quickly how to either cook from scratch or medicate the kids. I'm not a big fan of unnecessary medication, but I AM a fan of good food, and I'm also cheap. I'd rather grow my own food, I'd rather sweat and rack up mosquito bites galore in the garden and have perma-dirt under my nails all Summer long than pay for second-rate food in the grocery store, especially when the food is in season.

We're having a lovely warm spell this week, tonight excepted. Tonight it's windy like crazy, blowing a good 35-40mph gusts as the cold front slams us, but even tomorrow it's still projected to be above freezing, followed by a warming trend that takes us to nearly 70F by the end of the week! The heavy wet snow we got earlier has been melting and freezing since it fell (and expanding the crack in our concrete patio, but that's another story) and waterlogging the garden bed and the pots on the patio, so today I tipped over the pots and even dug a bit in what will eventually be the garlic bed (which I never got around to planting before the frost hit). By the weekend, I should have garlic in the ground, and I will feel like a proper gardener again!

I also measured the garden bed today. I had no idea our garden was pushing 30 feet long! Only 6 feet across, but LONG! Tried to map it out on the computer but I can't get the paper big enough to suit me! Gonna have to actually use, um, bigger paper. And maybe a ruler. And a pencil. *grin*

I've got two books I'm using as inspiration for what I'm hoping to do this summer: Square Foot Gardening and How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine. The idea is to basically use the land most efficiently, both space-wise and rotation-wise (cool-weather, warm-weather, cool-weather). As much as I love our local Farmer's Market, there's still no guarantee that the food is grown organically without pesticides unless the farmers say so, and I'm, well, fussy these days.

It's still too early for me to be putting seeds into flats, but another couple weeks and I can at least start the lettuce. I had to lose a lot of beans and peas to learn to not even bother starting them before the end of March.../ but I have a window box ready to take up space in the bay window - just not the space yet, or the plans and seeds.

More garden musings will come later, but this will do for now. :-)