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

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

                   

“We dance round in a ring and suppose, While the secret sits in the middle and knows” ~ Robert Frost

Even though it's way off topic, and after I refused to reveal myself to my first commenter stating that I want this blog is to be about Kimberley's Garden and not so much about Kimberley...

My new bosom garden blogging friend Linda who writes Garden Girl has invited me to participate in a meme: "List Ten Things That People Don't Know About You" It's almost too challenging since I tend to be a very open person, so I'm changing it to...

"Ten Things That The Public May Not Know About Me"

1. I was born in Wurzburg Germany while my father was in the military headed to Vietnam
2. I gave birth at home four times (on purpose! as Linda says)
3. My eldest child is 21 - the age I was when I had him - making me officially old enough to be a grandma. (Yikes!)
4. I do not want grandchildren - but not for reasons of vanity. As much as I love meine kinder, I feel guilty for producing a litter of western super consumers and I hope they'll be gentler to the environment than I was. To clarify:  I would dearly love any grandchildren that come along, but my hope is that if my children want to have families that they'll consider adopting someone who's already here and needs one - the more humanitarian and ecologically responsible option.
5. Ok, my other blog readers are well aware of this, but I am a die hard agnostic and I publicly question and often ridicule all the major religions in a quixotic effort to find and/or add some clarity to the convoluted and dangerous subject. (you gotta start somewhere)
6. I've been a professional cook/chef off and on for 28 years and the highlights were working as the pastry chef at Robert Duval's former restaurant (was his at the time) The Rail Stop in The Plains, Virginia and also at Restaurant Nora in Washington DC, the first all organic haute cuisine restaurant in the east.
7. Nora and I did NOT get along. But Mr. Duval and I did. He has a major sweet tooth and loved to watch me bake, often asking questions and or just lurking around to observe the process.
8. I say outrageous things just to get laughs (all the time)
9. Sadly, I have never attended college
10. In addition to being an avid new gardener and former chef, I am also a traditionally published writer (culinary and travel topics), a mixed media artist and photographer, and my recycled bike parts sculpture "Where Bicycles Come From" will hang in downtown Montpelier, Vermont all summer as part of their Sculptcycles exhibition. The picture is of the model, but the actual sculpture will be approx 5'x5' made of bike tires spray painted and wrapped in white duct tape with a tricycle suspended in the center. The contraption will be suspended from fishing line from some high anchor hopefully to the effect that it appears very sporelike to the viewers below.
11. Bonus: I am unemployed. (Anything considered.)

Well there you have it.
XXKHT

Next up BABY PICTURES! (and I mean the green kind)

“If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?” ~ Dr. Lawrence J. Peters

Helpful Hint #3

Never leave a dish bin full of germinating mix lying around - even if you think you might use it again soon(ish); It resembles a litter box and this will not go unnoticed by your kitties. (duh)

On that note...all this studious attention to blogging has let the apartment run to ruin. Drat!
XXKHT

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day” Simone de Beauvoir quotes

“The difference between 'involvement' and 'commitment' is like an eggs-and-ham breakfast: the chicken was 'involved' - the pig was 'committed'." ~anon

In other news....

I have a confession. I want to raise chickens.

Problem: I live in downtown Burlington, Vermont in a two bedroom, upstairs rental, which is one of the many reasons I community garden (and glad for it!).

I'd heard there are chickens in downtown Burlington (figuratively, not literally), but I never dreamed I could keep them myself. I'd always figured raising chickens fitted on the long list of life goals some where between buying a house with property  and building an outdoor bread oven.

I opened the 7Days this morning and what to my wondering eyes should appear? Some Burlington HS kid raising chickens in his backyard downtown, that's what. Now, I'm not a covetous person by nature, but I have to admit, this story makes me plain old fashioned jealous.

Honestly, rarely a week passes that I don't at least once pine aloud for brooding hens of my own. How I long to gather warm green and pink (and brown and blue) eggs out from under happy, clucking birds who live right in my own backyard, where I can get to them whenever. The desire has become something like a mantra.

I eat eggs almost every day. I love them prepared in every way except over hard. If there's such a thing as reincarnation, I was likely an egg sucking spiny anteater in a previous life. But in my defense, at forty-two, I still have exceptional hair and skin, and most people guess my age to be far less than reality.

Besides strong genes, and avoiding the sun in my youth, I've credited this to my love of eggs, with their 13 vitamins and as many minerals and rich protein content. Also, no creature has to die to provide all this goodness; and if you buy from local humane farmers like Lucky Ladies down the Intervale, even better yet.

Studies show that happy animals produce better quality foodstuffs, and eggs are no exception - hens that forage actual insects produce glorious, dark, rich yolks. Ever notice that conventional white egg yolks have a bland, barely yellow hue? Garbage in, garbage out, I say.

Sadly, even though industrious high schooler Zev Chasen, has realized my dream at a tender age, I think I will have to wait until I at least own a home (with or without property). It's hard enough to find housing downtown with two cats - can you imagine trying to explain "flock of brooding hens" on a rental agreement?

For now, veggie porn'll have to do.
XXKHT

Helpful Hint #1: Eggshells are useful additions to the garden. Eggshell tea, made by filling a vessel with eggshells and water and letting it steep for a few days creates a calcium rich liquid for watering plants. Alternately, use the water left over from boiling eggs or intensify the solution by boiling the eggshells first. Tomatoes especially need the calcium and it's supposed to be superior for watering seedlings.

Edge garden beds with loosely ground eggshells as an organic slug repellent. The sharp shells cut the slugs up, so naturally they avoid it.