2/26/11
First seeds in!
We planted our sweet peas today, using the very technical "jam it down with a chopstick" method.
The Greenline Garden Roster
Deciding what to plant in a small space is a bit of a mental challenge. We started our plan by listing veggies and herbs we use frequently and would want readily on-hand. Simple enough. But choosing plants that all germinated at the same time would crowd somebody out. Fortunately, three of our must-haves -- chard, kale, and bok choi -- can be grown in the fall instead of the early spring and peas are ready to be ripped out by the time mid-summer seedlings are ready to go outside. So here's our roster going forward:
A zillion places on the internet sell seeds. We bought some of ours from this outlet Uprising Seeds that Christine's uncle out in Portland recommended. He met one of the owners at a "deep ecology" meeting. She introduced herself as a Gypsy. So, I think it's a pretty safe bet that these seeds will grow.
- ancho/poblano hybrid peppers
- snap peas
- lacinato kale
- rainbow swiss chard
- lettuce
- arugula
- fennel
- pak choi
- parsley
- lemon balm
- cilantro
- thyme
- sage
- chives
- mint
- dill
- thai chili
- rosemary
- oregano
- thai basil
- holy basil
- tarragon
A zillion places on the internet sell seeds. We bought some of ours from this outlet Uprising Seeds that Christine's uncle out in Portland recommended. He met one of the owners at a "deep ecology" meeting. She introduced herself as a Gypsy. So, I think it's a pretty safe bet that these seeds will grow.
2/24/11
DYI Compost in the City
I've found the homeowner equivalent of Jim Carey's "most annoying sound in the world:" the horrendous metallic squeal made as my pitifully-underpowered cordless drill worked its way through a metal garbage can. It was also an incredibly loud most annoying sound. So loud, in fact that a contractor working next door walked up and asked me what I was doing. When I told him I was making a composter, he said, "so it's not just wanton destruction." Well, I replied, there is that element, too.
People with suburban yards (at least w/o deer or raccoon problems) of course don't need to poke holes in perfectly good trash cans to compost - they can just throw everything on a big pile out back. Or they can build a neater wooden box, like the kids at Harriet Tubman Elementary have for their great schoolyard garden in Columbia Heights. Those of us fighting the constant battle against vermin large and larger need the security of zinc. Everything I read, including this handy guide from the DC government (pdf) waved away from plastic since the bastards can chew through.
The metal (zinc?) wasn't impossible to get through, but it took sacrificing a drill bit and some serious wrist exertion on my part to get 'er done. I started out trying to poke a hole with a nail and then widen it out somehow. Don't do this. It took forEVER, made even more noise, and puts your thumb needlessly in peril. I felt bad about all the noise either way, but it was in the mid-afternoon on a weekday. One of the advantages of being unemployed is you don't have to piss off your neighbors every weekend with your inane shenanigans.
Here's how the bad boy turned out: Kind of a la climax of Bonnie and Clyde ...
I'll spare you the "what the compost looks like shot." Besides, the top was mostly leaves and paper anyway, which is how you keep the stinky composting stuff happy. Directions I've read suggest throwing in not only your plant cooking waste, but eggshells and "browns:" leaves, paper towel and toilet paper rolls, small sticks, cardboard egg cartons, etc. I've got some packing paper from Crate and Barrel that has a cool woven structure in there. Whatever you toss in, keep it small and airy.
Christine's uncle out in Portlandia has totally embraced our new-found eco-whatever and gave us a small under-the-sink odorless composter for Xmas. I was skeptical, but the thing works great and it remains odorless enough to keep under there and not notice unless you open the cabinet. Pairing up the indoor and outdoor composters is a good strategy because in cool weather it's hard to get the microbes going. The indoor composter gets warm as the food breaks down, which is kind of eerie I'll admit.
The DC government apparently will let you take leaf compost for free from the Ft. Totten trash station. I can't find the details about this, though, as my wife told me about it and she's not here right now. But she didn't make it up. It'll probably be tough to get usable compost out of our bin by spring, so we may have to figure out a delivery device there -- i.e., con her brother once again into letting us use his truck.
People with suburban yards (at least w/o deer or raccoon problems) of course don't need to poke holes in perfectly good trash cans to compost - they can just throw everything on a big pile out back. Or they can build a neater wooden box, like the kids at Harriet Tubman Elementary have for their great schoolyard garden in Columbia Heights. Those of us fighting the constant battle against vermin large and larger need the security of zinc. Everything I read, including this handy guide from the DC government (pdf) waved away from plastic since the bastards can chew through.
The metal (zinc?) wasn't impossible to get through, but it took sacrificing a drill bit and some serious wrist exertion on my part to get 'er done. I started out trying to poke a hole with a nail and then widen it out somehow. Don't do this. It took forEVER, made even more noise, and puts your thumb needlessly in peril. I felt bad about all the noise either way, but it was in the mid-afternoon on a weekday. One of the advantages of being unemployed is you don't have to piss off your neighbors every weekend with your inane shenanigans.
Here's how the bad boy turned out: Kind of a la climax of Bonnie and Clyde ...
Christine's uncle out in Portlandia has totally embraced our new-found eco-whatever and gave us a small under-the-sink odorless composter for Xmas. I was skeptical, but the thing works great and it remains odorless enough to keep under there and not notice unless you open the cabinet. Pairing up the indoor and outdoor composters is a good strategy because in cool weather it's hard to get the microbes going. The indoor composter gets warm as the food breaks down, which is kind of eerie I'll admit.
The DC government apparently will let you take leaf compost for free from the Ft. Totten trash station. I can't find the details about this, though, as my wife told me about it and she's not here right now. But she didn't make it up. It'll probably be tough to get usable compost out of our bin by spring, so we may have to figure out a delivery device there -- i.e., con her brother once again into letting us use his truck.
2/23/11
Garden Clones
For a hobby so steeped in all-natural purity, I'm perhaps unreasonably amused by the fact that in gardening to grow a new plant from a cutting of one plant is called "cloning." Sounds so insidious, so technological -- like Ray Bradbury is growing my garden.
Really, all it takes is cutting off a piece of a plant and sticking it in water for awhile. Some plants, particularly herbs, will just sprout roots. There's a gel you can buy for cloning to encourage the little amputation to put down roots that supposedly works well. We bought some at a shop in Adams Morgan called Urban Sustainable. Even if you never grow squat, check this place out if you're a Washingtonian -- it's one huge science project pretending to be a storefront, with hydroponic vats and grow lamps everywhere. The woman working the floor also talks like Michael Caine, which is fun. I'm tempted so smear some of this cloning gel on myself but I won't because it's friggin expensive -- in the neighborhood of $15. But a little supposedly goes a long way. The Urban Sustainable folks have about a dozen basil plants growing happily that were spawned from a dab of clone goo at the open plant wound.
We didn't have any plants around to sever so we tried a little experiment - we stuck twigs of rosemary that we bought at the grocery store in some water. Low and behold, even without the clone helper they sprouted roots. Next, we dabbed the goo on the ends of supermarket thyme. Results this time were poor, as no roots have formed -- although the thyme's still green and happy in the jar. The rosemary looked good enough after a few weeks that we stuck it in some actual soil. It seems to be doing just fine:
Ok, so the one on the right is doing fine and has new growth. But 50% ain't bad for this operation. The best conclusion to pull from all of this is probably just that rosemary would grow on the dark side of Pluto. Too bad I almost never use it in my cooking. Clearly, though, even without outdoor space we could keep this sucker going to be a useful little plant.
Really, all it takes is cutting off a piece of a plant and sticking it in water for awhile. Some plants, particularly herbs, will just sprout roots. There's a gel you can buy for cloning to encourage the little amputation to put down roots that supposedly works well. We bought some at a shop in Adams Morgan called Urban Sustainable. Even if you never grow squat, check this place out if you're a Washingtonian -- it's one huge science project pretending to be a storefront, with hydroponic vats and grow lamps everywhere. The woman working the floor also talks like Michael Caine, which is fun. I'm tempted so smear some of this cloning gel on myself but I won't because it's friggin expensive -- in the neighborhood of $15. But a little supposedly goes a long way. The Urban Sustainable folks have about a dozen basil plants growing happily that were spawned from a dab of clone goo at the open plant wound.
We didn't have any plants around to sever so we tried a little experiment - we stuck twigs of rosemary that we bought at the grocery store in some water. Low and behold, even without the clone helper they sprouted roots. Next, we dabbed the goo on the ends of supermarket thyme. Results this time were poor, as no roots have formed -- although the thyme's still green and happy in the jar. The rosemary looked good enough after a few weeks that we stuck it in some actual soil. It seems to be doing just fine:
Ok, so the one on the right is doing fine and has new growth. But 50% ain't bad for this operation. The best conclusion to pull from all of this is probably just that rosemary would grow on the dark side of Pluto. Too bad I almost never use it in my cooking. Clearly, though, even without outdoor space we could keep this sucker going to be a useful little plant.
2/22/11
Dirt!
Short of having plants in the ground, our garden has now gone from the realm of the hypothetical to reality. Presidents' Day was Dirt Day. Our delivery of topsoil from an outfit in Springfield, VA came and we decided to plot and install the raised bed kits we'd bought a few months ago that morning. Digging up the sod and filling the beds in one day was way overly ambitious, so we're not all done - but it's a good start.
As I'd mentioned before, we had debated what kind of material to use to construct our raised beds. While some sort of stone or brick would have allowed for the kind of undulating design my wife first hoped for, it obviously was too expensive. Finding that DYI recipe for wood preservative pretty much cinched 2x10s in my mind, and we'd bought the paraffin, mineral spirits, and turpentine we needed. And then we stumbled on these bad boys:
There's nothing wrong with the image - that label is quite faded. I'm sure these things sat in the garden section for at least a summer. At half off, they were about $63 each, for kits that made a 4x8 terraced raised bed. The boards are a generic brown, more the color of a toy log than actual wood, but whatever. They don't look too atrocious. I've seen a similar product at Costco for $90 or so.
Because this brand's boards interlock with a top and bottom cylinder at each end (joined with a plastic stake through each), they are not infinitely modular. The main problem is you can only join two boards together on a single level of the box. If you wanted, say, to box off a section and still extend the bed outward you can't.
Eight feet was also too large to fit two of these side-by-side in our yard, which is 16 feet across at the fences.
The only real solution was to lay out both kids in an "L," with the elbow in the southwest corner. I rough fit the shape we needed together and spraypainted down the outline to dig up the sod.
And here's where we started to screw up. We couldn't do, as my wife first suggested, lower beds at the ends and a higher bed at the corner because of the aforementioned three-board-intersection problem. But I only realized that after laying this shape out and marking the sod before making sure the parts of the L were square and the line on the west (right-hand in the photo) side was far enough away from the inner elbow corner. It was about two inches short, so the sod outline wasn't going to fit exactly.
If you build one of these kits, make sure you assemble the interior sections first to make sure everything will fit squarely in the end. In our case, that meant installing the board that would go between the center north-south plank and the back wall of the bed. I actually built a square first in the back-center section of this image before realizing the three-intersecting-board problem again. Good thing I'm not taking the LSAT's anytime soon. I felt pretty dumb by the end of all this.
As we were approaching the end one of our neighbors walked by and opined on our progress. Our side of the block has unusually large back yards and ours is the only one that still has grass, and she commented how she wished she had the space for a garden, too. But were we prepared to feed half the neighborhood? Christine was kind of shocked by the idea that people would steal our veggies. I'd pretty much counted out half of our harvest to human/squirrel losses. We'll see what happens.
As I'd mentioned before, we had debated what kind of material to use to construct our raised beds. While some sort of stone or brick would have allowed for the kind of undulating design my wife first hoped for, it obviously was too expensive. Finding that DYI recipe for wood preservative pretty much cinched 2x10s in my mind, and we'd bought the paraffin, mineral spirits, and turpentine we needed. And then we stumbled on these bad boys:
Because this brand's boards interlock with a top and bottom cylinder at each end (joined with a plastic stake through each), they are not infinitely modular. The main problem is you can only join two boards together on a single level of the box. If you wanted, say, to box off a section and still extend the bed outward you can't.
Eight feet was also too large to fit two of these side-by-side in our yard, which is 16 feet across at the fences.
 |
| The back yard as we get started. |
 |
| the rough layout |
If you build one of these kits, make sure you assemble the interior sections first to make sure everything will fit squarely in the end. In our case, that meant installing the board that would go between the center north-south plank and the back wall of the bed. I actually built a square first in the back-center section of this image before realizing the three-intersecting-board problem again. Good thing I'm not taking the LSAT's anytime soon. I felt pretty dumb by the end of all this.
When you're feeling dumb, brute manual labor sure helps. I cleared much of this section while Christine carved out another useless corner of our fence line for flower bulbs. Mac also lent his digging expertise.
The dirt delivery was seamless. Basically, a guy with dirt in a truck asks where you want it and dumps it there. We got more than we needed for just over $200. Considering we can get compost from the city for free (and we're making our own for later), the total damage for the project before plants was in the neighborhood of $350. If we can grow roughly $450 worth of produce this season we'll approach breaking even, depending on how much we have to water/if we set up a rain barrel.
Dirt delivery in a city obviously can be tricky depending on your lot. We're lucky to have a parking pad big enough for a big pile of dirt and a car and that had enough space for a truck to back up in our alley. The delivery guy was a friggin precision stunt pilot with his truck - I was sure he was going to take off one of my side mirrors - so it can be done even in a tight space. I'd find a way to make it work even if it means sacrificing your parking space for a bit because bag after bag of purchased soil from a store will be way more aggravating (multiple trips) and more costly.
Even for us, dirt delivery was not perfect. Our entire yard is raised off the street level with a retaining wall. We had to peel back part of our jerry-rigged back fence (which is reinforced with barbed wire!?) and hand up buckets of dirt to one another from the parking slab below.
Meanwhile, the 70-degree weather of Friday was long gone and a cold drizzle started to fall. We called it a day about 4:30 with the low bed filled with dirt.
 | |
| leaf mulch to keep the dirt from hardening after rain |
 |
| Ta-Daa! |
2/15/11
Garden Derivatives
I just finished Michael Lewis' The Big Short. By finish, I mean I started the book on a plane months ago and finally got around to reading the last 1/3. I'm a big fan of Moneyball and I'd put this book just a notch below that one. Anyway, I was thinking while walking to Metro the other morning that our garden needs to create some derivatives to insulate us from the rather substantial risks that exist up here in an urban horticultural setting.
Rodent derivatives - paid if rats eat a certain percentage of our crop. I'm going to long this one since I'm following a scorched earth policy with the rats.
Vagrant derivatives - paid if local vagrants eat/urinate on/trample our plants. Not unlikely.
Rotgut derivatives - a sub-class of the vagrant derivative - insuring against the contamination of the garden by the incredibly potent Jamaican rum or Wild Irish Rose, bottles of which I find frequently in the alley, or by the glass of the bottles themselves.
Tagging derivatives - just in case somebody decides to spray paint the garden. As Prince of Petworth points out, everything else in the city has been tagged, so why not.
GOP Energy Committee derivatives - created to protect from extreme drought created by unregulated greenhouse gases.
GMO derivatives - in case something in the yard mutates my plants into something inedible/sentient. I guess I should boost my homeowner's insurance in case something growing back there decides to eat people.
Rodent derivatives - paid if rats eat a certain percentage of our crop. I'm going to long this one since I'm following a scorched earth policy with the rats.
Vagrant derivatives - paid if local vagrants eat/urinate on/trample our plants. Not unlikely.
Rotgut derivatives - a sub-class of the vagrant derivative - insuring against the contamination of the garden by the incredibly potent Jamaican rum or Wild Irish Rose, bottles of which I find frequently in the alley, or by the glass of the bottles themselves.
Tagging derivatives - just in case somebody decides to spray paint the garden. As Prince of Petworth points out, everything else in the city has been tagged, so why not.
GOP Energy Committee derivatives - created to protect from extreme drought created by unregulated greenhouse gases.
GMO derivatives - in case something in the yard mutates my plants into something inedible/sentient. I guess I should boost my homeowner's insurance in case something growing back there decides to eat people.
2/14/11
The Plan -- raised beds
Our " back yard" is really the stuff they dug out to build the foundation in 1909, plus whatever fill was needed to complete the job. Over the years the soil (and I use that word loosely) had accumulated paint, glass shards, drug paraphernalia and who knows what else. As I dug out a woody shrub-weed near the foundation I cut through a thick multi-colored layer of clay. I'm guessing that purple soil is not what you want for a veggie garden, so raised beds were downright mandatory for this project.
The original plan we came up with involved an elaborate layout of wooden raised beds. Because we're going to put in a patio with a pergola eventually, we were going to curve these beds around the back of the yard - which is about 30' deep and 18' wide. I drew a sketch to scale and everything.
Every gardening reference out there we saw strongly warned us away from using pressure-treated lumber, so we actually thought about making these beds with brick or concrete at first. If you're interested in going this route, check out the BBC's suggestions for creating your own curved surfaces. We almost did this until we realized it'd be too late in the season before it was warm enough to get the concrete to behave outside. Also, it looked kinda hard.
Plan B was wood. But again, the pressure-treated problem. The Gardener's A-Z Guide had a quick fix there: it cites a USDA make-your-own wood preservative that's supposed to last up to 20 years, minus the toxicity. The recipe is 1 oz paraffin wax; 3 cups of exterior varnish or 1 1/2 linseed oil; and enough solvent - either paint thinner, turpentine, or mineral spirits -- to make the whole thing a gallon. Melt the wax in a double-boiler, then add the solvent, the varnish/linseed oil, and stir away. Then apply the mixture to your wood in a heavy coat.
We were good to go with that plan, even though it took forever to find the paraffin in Michael's (it's in bricks in the candle making section. People make their own decorative candles apparently). We happened to be in a suburban Home Depot (as opposed to the closest one to us in Brentwood; this one we call the "sniper Home Depot because of this) and stumbled upon a pallet of prefab, plastic, wood-simulating raised bed kits that were half off. At $60ish bucks, they were more or less a push versus the cost of the wood, hardware, and the above preservative mixture. Score. More on these guys later this weekend when we put them together before our dirt comes on Monday.
The original plan we came up with involved an elaborate layout of wooden raised beds. Because we're going to put in a patio with a pergola eventually, we were going to curve these beds around the back of the yard - which is about 30' deep and 18' wide. I drew a sketch to scale and everything.
Every gardening reference out there we saw strongly warned us away from using pressure-treated lumber, so we actually thought about making these beds with brick or concrete at first. If you're interested in going this route, check out the BBC's suggestions for creating your own curved surfaces. We almost did this until we realized it'd be too late in the season before it was warm enough to get the concrete to behave outside. Also, it looked kinda hard.
Plan B was wood. But again, the pressure-treated problem. The Gardener's A-Z Guide had a quick fix there: it cites a USDA make-your-own wood preservative that's supposed to last up to 20 years, minus the toxicity. The recipe is 1 oz paraffin wax; 3 cups of exterior varnish or 1 1/2 linseed oil; and enough solvent - either paint thinner, turpentine, or mineral spirits -- to make the whole thing a gallon. Melt the wax in a double-boiler, then add the solvent, the varnish/linseed oil, and stir away. Then apply the mixture to your wood in a heavy coat.
We were good to go with that plan, even though it took forever to find the paraffin in Michael's (it's in bricks in the candle making section. People make their own decorative candles apparently). We happened to be in a suburban Home Depot (as opposed to the closest one to us in Brentwood; this one we call the "sniper Home Depot because of this) and stumbled upon a pallet of prefab, plastic, wood-simulating raised bed kits that were half off. At $60ish bucks, they were more or less a push versus the cost of the wood, hardware, and the above preservative mixture. Score. More on these guys later this weekend when we put them together before our dirt comes on Monday.
2/12/11
Getting Started
The Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library in Washington was designed by the internationally-renowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. One of the leading lights of Bauhaus modernist architecture, Mies designed a simple rectangular structure composed of black steel and plate glass. When the city broke ground on it in the summer of 1968, the cinders from the riots that followed King's assassination had just cooled.
Mies' modernist vision hasn't exactly stood the test of time. The structure looks like a giant bird cage for homeless people. Its main lobby, cheered up by a huge mural of King's life, gives off the vibe of a bus station otherwise. Rather than wait for the slow and minuscule elevators, I take the stairs and risk being clobbered by falling ceiling tiles. Just getting to the place feels dangerous: a giant new office building is being erected next door, its massive concrete bones practically pushing Mies' sad black box and its lost modernist vision for the future off the block and onto the curb.
All the same, the MLK library is the unlikely place of where our story begins. I love the library, don't get me wrong. It actually has a great collection of all kinds of useful books and it's shockingly underutilized by Washingtonians. For instance, I checked out a critically-acclaimed novel written in 2000 this summer. I was the first person ever to do so, and they had two copies of the book. So when we decided this winter to get going on planning our garden project, all it took was a quick search of the library catalog to find an armful of books to help.
Half of what I found were in the "business and technology" section of the library, and the other half were in the "arts" wing. That seems about right. Three were really helpful, so log on and recall them from me if you're starting out, too. Or buy your own. I'm going to highlight these three because they really concentrated on giving gardening tips with an eye on producing lots of good veggies. A bunch of new books out there work gardening into a whole homesteading lifestyle and include sections on canning or how to raise chickens or how to make your own candles. Fine. Not helpful to me.
First up: Raymond Nones' Raised-Bed Vegetable Gardening Made Simple. (Countryman Pres <how great is that name?> 2010). This book is slim and has a bunch of cool pen-and-ink drawings so it looks hip. But Ray's an old guy who's all business. His idea of good gardening is growing as much damn food as you can on the model of World War II-era Victory Gardens, which he would have grown himself if he wasn't busy fighting in the war. He's got a system and that system's fairly complicated if you have no idea what you're doing, but book's a great introduction to the fact you need a system of your own -- like when to plant what.
The other two books we liked concentrated on the plants themselves. Tanya L.K. Denckla's The Gardener's A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food (Storey Publishing, 2003), and Gayla Trail's Grow Great Grub (Crown, 2010). Both give you a great handle on what the veggies dancing in your head actually need to survive in plant form. Trail is holding a giant bunch of mint on the cover of her book if you need some inspiration (although mint I'm pretty sure would grow on Mars). Both books, with an assist from Nones, helped us plan the planting schedule we're going to use this spring. They also taught us how to pair up plants to keep pests away. These books are meant for small-scale, urban gardeners -- particularly Trail's, which includes tips how to grow stuff on your balcony or in your window. Space really only limits the variety of things you can grow, not really the type of stuff you can pull off, so even if you're not lucky like we are to have a small back yard, you'll find something useful.
Sorry the first entry on this blog is so Reading Rainbow. Almost everything I'm going to write about here, though, I will have read first in a book or on a website, so it just seemed like the honest way to start.
Mies' modernist vision hasn't exactly stood the test of time. The structure looks like a giant bird cage for homeless people. Its main lobby, cheered up by a huge mural of King's life, gives off the vibe of a bus station otherwise. Rather than wait for the slow and minuscule elevators, I take the stairs and risk being clobbered by falling ceiling tiles. Just getting to the place feels dangerous: a giant new office building is being erected next door, its massive concrete bones practically pushing Mies' sad black box and its lost modernist vision for the future off the block and onto the curb.
All the same, the MLK library is the unlikely place of where our story begins. I love the library, don't get me wrong. It actually has a great collection of all kinds of useful books and it's shockingly underutilized by Washingtonians. For instance, I checked out a critically-acclaimed novel written in 2000 this summer. I was the first person ever to do so, and they had two copies of the book. So when we decided this winter to get going on planning our garden project, all it took was a quick search of the library catalog to find an armful of books to help.
Half of what I found were in the "business and technology" section of the library, and the other half were in the "arts" wing. That seems about right. Three were really helpful, so log on and recall them from me if you're starting out, too. Or buy your own. I'm going to highlight these three because they really concentrated on giving gardening tips with an eye on producing lots of good veggies. A bunch of new books out there work gardening into a whole homesteading lifestyle and include sections on canning or how to raise chickens or how to make your own candles. Fine. Not helpful to me.
First up: Raymond Nones' Raised-Bed Vegetable Gardening Made Simple. (Countryman Pres <how great is that name?> 2010). This book is slim and has a bunch of cool pen-and-ink drawings so it looks hip. But Ray's an old guy who's all business. His idea of good gardening is growing as much damn food as you can on the model of World War II-era Victory Gardens, which he would have grown himself if he wasn't busy fighting in the war. He's got a system and that system's fairly complicated if you have no idea what you're doing, but book's a great introduction to the fact you need a system of your own -- like when to plant what.
The other two books we liked concentrated on the plants themselves. Tanya L.K. Denckla's The Gardener's A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food (Storey Publishing, 2003), and Gayla Trail's Grow Great Grub (Crown, 2010). Both give you a great handle on what the veggies dancing in your head actually need to survive in plant form. Trail is holding a giant bunch of mint on the cover of her book if you need some inspiration (although mint I'm pretty sure would grow on Mars). Both books, with an assist from Nones, helped us plan the planting schedule we're going to use this spring. They also taught us how to pair up plants to keep pests away. These books are meant for small-scale, urban gardeners -- particularly Trail's, which includes tips how to grow stuff on your balcony or in your window. Space really only limits the variety of things you can grow, not really the type of stuff you can pull off, so even if you're not lucky like we are to have a small back yard, you'll find something useful.
Sorry the first entry on this blog is so Reading Rainbow. Almost everything I'm going to write about here, though, I will have read first in a book or on a website, so it just seemed like the honest way to start.
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