I have been reading a lot of gardening, farming, and cooking books lately.  While this was one of the books that Jill originally requested from the library, I thoroughly enjoyed it!  In many ways, it reminded me of reading Driving Over Lemons – which I read a couple of years ago on our trip to Spain – because of its chronological nature and honest assessment of growing your own food, but unlike that book, it hit closer to home.  Very few people will move to Andalusia and purchase a farm, but many of us could move across the country (or just across the state) to live in a community where growing one’s own food is not only possible but common.  And, this is why I enjoyed this book so much! Read more »

When I saw The Landscaping Revolution on the library shelf, I thought that it may be an interesting book.  Reading the back cover, it seemed like a good book that would focus on how to landscape without resorting the large amounts of chemicals and maybe how to deal with some of the common landscaping issues without the common answers.

In reality, this book is preach-y and written in a very annoying style!  Despite being only 160 pages long, the book’s tone made it seem way longer!  Out of the entire book, I found one section useful … from page 39 to page 41 when the subject of Native Lawn Alternatives was addressed.  In it, I learned that buffalograss (Buchloe dactyloides) is drought-tolerant and is slow-growing – only needing to see the mower a couple of times per summer.  In addition, new strains have been developed to make it even more lawn-like (in the traditional sense) and to stay even shorter (the shortest grows to only about 4 inches).  In many other sections, the environmental arguments are either way old-school or rather alarmist – a style that makes its age (only 10 years) very evident.

While I could see that this book could be a useful (though very limited) reference book, I would not recommend it as a good garden read.  There are many other books that are better written, better references, or just newer.

A couple of weekends ago, Jill and I did some gardening.  We added mulch around the house and planted a handful of plants – 4 tomatoes, 3 squash, some herbs (including two types of basil, in pots below) and a bunch of flowers … including the sunflowers that we grew from seeds.  Here are few photos …

END DATE: Midnight Sunday 13th June 2010

Thinking about moving back home has made me think of the things that I want to be able to do and one of those things is to have a nice little garden to grow some fruit, vegetables, and maybe a handful of flowers.  As I was thinking about my future garden, I have also been thinking about the reasons that I want to grow my own food.

There are a whole bunch of standard reasons to grow your own food, such as:

• To save money.
• To have fresher vegetables.
• To get outdoors into the fresh air.

But, honestly, most of those are not the reasons that I want to garden.  While I enjoy fresh vegetables and love the outdoors, they are not the things that make we want to garden.  Additionally, gardening will not necessarily save a family money on vegetables. Read more »

Over the Easter weekend, we did a little gardening around our patio!  It was in preparation for a summer of sunshine and to brighten up the patio (which had become very dreary-looking over the winter).  It is full of flowers and herbs – not trying to grow any veg this year, but the blueberry plants are still going strong!

Read more »

Even with our small patio and limited sun, I have been able to grow some food … needless to say it was only some tomatoes, blueberries, and some peppers. Once I have a somewhat larger garden, then I will want to expand the variety of food grown. As I have posted before, there are a lot heirloom tomoto varieties available, but what else is available for your backyard?

TreeHugger regularly posts stories about gardening and recently, they posted an article about a nursery that specializes in edible perennials called Edible Landscaping, based in Afton, VA (about 1.5 hours west of Richmond along I-64). They have a whole range of plants – from Asparagus to Wyeberries (a type of blackberry). If you live in their general area (VA, MD, or NC), they even sale large fruit trees in up to 45 gallon buckets.

For those who want something now, they are having a Fall Sale, with up to 50% off!

Baby Tomato & Chilli Plants:

Okay, I have enjoyed growing some tomatoes from seed (they are actually Tumbling Toms – both red & yellow). And, Jill has enjoyed eating them … but in the future, I want to grow some slightly different tomatoes, like these heirloom varieties from TomatoSeed.net:

<- Japanese Black Truffle Tomato

<- Mr. Stripey Tomato

<- Snow White Cherry Tomato

Don’t those look better and more interesting than the ones that you see in the store …