Our Community Garden

We planted our community garden plot today. I love this and luckily I have managed to enthuse our kids about the experience as well. This will be our third year at the garden. You don't get the same plot each year so we have learned that there is no value to the time and energy of double digging beds. Better to put landscape cloth over everything and get your plants in the ground. A garden pro also told us that this helps prevent the spread of disease from other people' s plants. Cool.

Some of the folks there are repeaters like us and we meet and greet and re-acquaint. Usually people like to stop by and talk with us. I think as much because I am wearing Lissa in a hiking backpack while I grub in the dirt planting tomatos as anything else. For some reason this seems so wild to other people but ordinary to me.

Before I stuffed her in the Kelty, all the kids helped clear the site of rocks. This is a job perfectly suited to my rock loving kiddos. All entered into this with enthusiasm usually reserved for the winners of Publishers Clearing House. Then while Kirsty laid the landscape cloth, I put Lissa in the carrier and on my back, gave the kids their snacks to re-charge and then we started planting. We have a small row of ornamental corn, hoping to grow essentially our own harvest decorations. We have 2 places where we planted pumpkins. KC is the pumpkin grower extraordinaire. This year he chose both white and orange varieties. Rob has always wanted to try corn so that was the impetus there. Then we have tomatos up the wazoo. We can a lot. Make our own sauce. Make our own salsa to use and give as gifts. We need lots of tomatos.

Unfortunately due to the bad economy more people wanted plots than ever before and in order to squeeze out more, the plots are smaller this year than in y ears past. So we over bought on our tomatos and wound up with a number of packs left over. We made friends with some fellow gardeners by gifting them with some of the tomatos, a la Pay it Forward. Good gardens make good neighbors I think! (grin) The other flat of tomatos we are going to try and container garden here at home. Our yard doesn't do spectacularly in the light category but we are going to give it a go. I also will have window boxes with basil as there wasn't room for that this year. Oh and we planted zuchinni. The boys could help actually plant and water; Lissa was mostly the cheering section in that area.

Our economic reality this year was that we are not able to afford buying the 2 CSA boxes that we have done in years past. I wish we could do it. I believe passionately that we should eat as close to home as possible, both for optimum health and because it makes no economic or environmental sense to me to eat foods shipped from all over the place. I am instead going to frequent the farmers markets and try and score some deals on fruits and veggies that way. We typically put most of our vegetables by with summer canning and freezing so it is important that I find a venue for this.

I am jazzed about our garden spot though. It looks good, the plants are a mix of heirloom and some more common ones. I love the way gardening takes a piece of ground that doesn't look like much and helps it to bear bounty. And one of our gardening neighbors has decided she wants to learn to can so we can even share that knowledge with others. It is sort of becoming a lost art; people stare at me when they hear I can. I take it as a compliment that they think I am too young to know how to do this.

The reality is that I grew up canning tomatos and pasta sauce with my family. My job was always the icky peeling off the skin in the cold water bath. But I learned the whole process by many years of helping and it has paid off. We have built on that knowledge and can make pickles, the aforementioned salsa, can our own pie fillings (typically apple and peach are the most cost effective in our region) and jams and jellies. With the apple pie filling, we save the peels and make a scrumptious apple peel jelly. Depending on the variety of apple it is either golden jelly that looks like sunshine in a jar, or soft pink like dawn just breaking. At any rate, always pretty on the shelves.

So now another growing season unfolds with promise and possibilities. Life is so good!