How Does Your Garden grow ????

My gardens grow all willy nilly. In any given season, there are lettuces and onions and 'Maters and squash and corn all growing up and around each other. I plant flowers all interspersed with my veggies too. Zinnias and marigolds and nasturtiums...all blooming away and giving the bugs something else to think about. This picture has potatoes and zinnias and radishes and lettuces and ...something else over there. lol There are garden gnomes and whirligigs and little plaques that stick in the ground and say things like, "The Earth laughs in Flowers." There are butterfly houses and toad homes and all manner of practical art to be found out there. And as always, at least one lazy cat sleeping in the shade of the green bean trellis.

I am writing this garden post tonight to psychically combat the winter. It has been grey and foggy here for almost 5 days. I need sun!!!!!!!!! I need to be reminded that spring is on it's way, that it comes every year and that the darkness won't last forever. The garden catalogs help. Looking at pictures of my gardens help too. I'm feeling better already.

I plant in raised beds that are not nice perfect rectangles, sided in by boards. I do a jig called Lasagna Gardening, where you lay organic materials down on top of each other and build it up, up, up. In the fall we start putting leaves out there. And at the beginning of winter, we empty out the series of compost bins where the chicken manure and used straw from the coop goes. There is also a bin that is all kitchen scraps. We (in a good year) put cow or horse manure (preferably horse) on the beds too. Then we cover them with black plastic and let 'em "cook". We also have a barrel composter that you crank to turn. All this good stuff goes on the garden beds. I generally start about 2/3 of my seeds in late March, in trays in the back bedroom or out in the mudroom, depending on if we're having a warm or a cold winter. It all breaks down into some of the most beautiful dirt you've ever laid eyes on. We do our part and God does his part. It's a good partnership.

I love working in the gardens. I love the smell of dirt, I love to wander out in the early mornings of summer and have a handful of cherry tomatoes or sugar peas for breakfast. Mahatma Gandhi said " To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves." I believe that...there is a very old and primal part of me that revels in putting plants and seeds into the earth and watching them grow. I was made to grow my own food...



Time for bed. Early day full of stuff tomorrow. Pre-op tests and then off to pick up some cookbooks from a Freecycle ad. WooHoo! It'll be like Christmas!!!!! I have no idea what they are or who they're by...only that they are all hard cover books. If you have never checked out Frecycle.com...you might wanna. It's a program to declutter AND keep things out of landfills. Just put in your town name...


Namaste...I shall dream of vegetables and sunshine...