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.