The Life of A Garden

Department of Redundancy Department

My friend Robert (R) is the garden coordinator for Zone 2 and the following is an email exchange between us that I found particularly funny.

Funny in particular!
XXKHT

"Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas." ~ Elizabeth Murray

Oh my goodness, it has been a busy couple of weeks! So many things have happened...For starters, spring is springing and how!

R and I measured out Zone 2 yesterday and today I painted a sign for the newbies. Of course I couldn't just spray paint a sign, I had to do it up. It was a good excuse to be outside, an avocation I've become quite passionate about these past couple of weeks.

and lest we forget the babies have been a growin' and a growin'....

and the Moon Flowers are a foot tall so we've been training them back on themselves (for now)...

Today, I soaked our Amish Sugar Snaps and Green Arrow Peas. After they germinate, they're going right in the dirt! (better late than never).

I have an appointment with my no-till/perennial garden site coordinator tomorrow morning. It seems the last people to garden my plot didn't clean up and I'm going to have to find someone to till it after I haul all the old stuff out of it (brussels sprouts, sunflowers, a pile of whatsit). Not really what I had expected, but I'll be happy when I have leeks till after the first frost, and kale and herbs that I won't have to take out whether they're ready to give up or not.

Last season, I took one of our Italian Flat Leaf Parsley plants and literally shoved it in a big pot with some soil. I set it on our glassed in but unheated porch and barely watered it, yet it  remained mostly green and edible until almost December, still had some green on it as late as March although it finally looked too weary to be appetizing. I'll definitely try that again next season despite that I'll be leaving the herb garden intact until nature kills her herself.

Which is as it should be.
XXKHT

The Growing Challenge

I signed up for the Growing Challenge today over at Elements in Time.

It's simple and about everything I'm doing anyway so why not?

Here are the criteria:

1. For this challenge, you must grow one additional type of fruit or vegetable than you did last year, and grow it from seed. If you’ve never grown anything, well, grow one thing!  Or if you’ve never grown beans or carrots or lettuce or strawberries, try one of those....  And if you don’t have a garden, you can grow it in a pot or on a window sill - see Gardening 101:  Ordering Seeds for links about how.  The goal is to push ourselves to grow a little more food than we have before.
2. If rule #1 is not enough of a challenge for you, you may make your own rules.  For example, I’m going to grow two fruits and three veggies more than I did last year.
3. You must post about gardening once each week. This could be a post about researching different plants, ordering seeds, buying pots, digging beds, planting the seeds, pruning, adding compost, all the way to preparing a meal that includes the food you grew.  **Please include “Growing Challenge” in the name of the posts - and/or have a Growing Challenge tag in your sidebar - so I can find them!*
4. Every Monday I will go to every participant’s website and check out what you’ve written, and write a summary on this blog. This will be a great way to see what everyone is up to and learn from one another. If you don’t have a blog, you can email me a blurb about your gardening progress.

Stay tuned...
XXKHT