The end of winter is always a thrilling time for gardeners. We gather up last year’s lessons learned and unfulfilled longings and search for ideas and ways to do better. We list then list again all the myriad foods we wish to serve our families straight from the back yard and all the herbs that we no longer want to buy at the grocery store. The appetite is great.
We also celebrate all over again last year’s experiments that were successful! The crops or bouquets that surprised even our own sweaty brows. (This is where having taken photos last year is really helpful.) We lust after fifty shades of green and intense flavors and every natural perfume this beautiful world has to offer.
I am certainly no exception. Right now on my coffee table is a wicker basket about two feet wide and half that deep, filled with brand new seed catalogs and gardening magazines. Countless sheets of paper have lists and diagrams scribbled with my ideas for 2014. I go to sleep thinking about the garden and I wake up thinking about the garden. I think about it when I run, and I talk about it every single day to anybody who will listen. Including our parrot. Everywhere I visit, I will inevitably spot a little expanse of dead lawn that could become a vegetable plot or maybe a barren ribbon of earth circling an office building that really should be a flowering border. I believe in my heart that everyone I meet wants our free Lazy W animal manure, and it baffles me when they decline.
This year some of my sweet local friends are joining the slow food movement with renewed passion. We are ordering seeds in large quantities to share the shipping costs and encourage each other, and we are doing so twice: Once next week for the earliest spring planting then again closer to tax day for the summer stuff. Some foods and flowers we have decided to buy locally.
Are you interested? Do you have even just a sunny patio where you could start a few bowls of lettuce, or maybe a little strip of lawn that could yield even more? It does not have to be fancy or ginormous to be thoroughly satisfying in every way! I’d be so happy if you followed along with us this year.
Here are the seeds we plan to order now in order to make the most of the cool months:
- radishes (both red and white)
- lettuces (There are so many different varieties! We’re ordering fancy-schmancy lettuces you’re not likely to buy at the grocery store.)
- kale (swoon)
- snow peas
- spinach
- carrots
- arugula
- broccoli raab
- parsley
- cilantro
And here are the foods we plan to seek out and buy locally, mostly because none of us are equipped with great grow lights or heating mats, so it makes more sense to buy flats of baby veggies rather than have them shipped:
- garlic
- potatoes
- strawberries (both the June-bearing and ever-bearing)
- broccoli
- cabbages (both colors)
- cauliflower
- brussels sprouts
- asparagus
Are you tempted? Or are you three steps ahead of me already? Either way, I wish you the grandest gardening adventure ever this year! I wish you good, nutritious, slow food that feeds your soul as well as your body. I wish you a true spiritual connection to your little piece of this earth, however big or small it is. And I wish you all the sensual pleasures we are promised for being caretakers here.
Stay tuned for more from the Lazy W slow food movement! This is only the beginning.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
~Wendell Berry
XOXOXOXO
I love seeing pics of your garden! We put in a ton of raised beds a few years ago and I also obsess over what to order what to plant. I have a very brown thumb, though, so we haven’t gotten a whole lot of produce to brag about, but enough to freeze and randomly eat in the cold months. I LOVE growing vegetables!!! My girls eat the sugar snap peas like candy right off the vines. And I love the fresh salads. My next favorite thing about our garden is my compost pile, so I totally get what you mean by free manure. I hope to be more active in the garden this year since I’m not huge pregnant, we’ll see how much work I can get done with this boy, maybe he’ll be content to play in the play pen in the shade, next to the surviving chickens?
Jammie, how fun!!! : ))
Ok I want to sit and talk with you. LOL
Compost, snap peas like candy off the vine, fresh salad, all of it is just wonderful.
Congratulations on your new baby, that is amazing! I used to bring my little ones to the garden, too. Lots of beautiful memories there.
Thank you for visiting, please stay in touch!
Your vegetables are gorgeous!! Can’t wait to see this years pictures!
Elizabeth, thank you so much! Honestly my garden is often a mess from a distance but how can any plant look ugly up close? I love it all. Looking forward to getting better acquainted with you this season! : )
I ordered a new grow light and some seeds to get me through the last months (yes, months not weeks). But I still have to wait a couple more weeks before putting anything in or I’ll have overgrown seedlings before planting. Cant’ wait for the snow to be gone and I can start thinking spring! First in the ground – spinach!
So exciting! It’s hard for me to imagine your growing season, but each year I understand it a tiny bit more. It really is amazing how much you accomplish up north in so few months. WOW. xoxo As always thanks for visiting my friend.
Is this the right time to order some Alfredo Pizza, dumplins, steak, cookies……
Oh baby it’s always Alfredo time…
Birding and gardening, I could talk about both, to perfect strangers, for hours and hours. Grew up on a 10 acre greenhouse and my blood is green, green, green. 🙂 I have tomatoes growing under lights inside, plus spinach and arugula coming along. It’s been a long winter and I am so eager to get my hands dirty out in my 4×12′ raised beds. My kids and I enjoy growing hot peppers, lettuces, herbs, cabbages, broccoli, peas, beans, and beets. But the real reason I do any of it is for the tomatoes. They’re my first love.
Happy gardening!
A few pics of our garden last year… http://www.craftyhomeschoolmama.com/2013/07/homeschool-curriculum-choices.html
Blessings, Joanna
oh man a ten acre greenhouse?? Wow! I can just smell your tomato and arugula babies from here. What zone are you in? I could talk to you for hours too, I think. So nice of you too visit!! now I am of to see your photos. : ))
Somehow I stumbled upon this post and it was the inspiration I needed! To bad it is not January anymore…but my little vegetable garden is starting to grow but I have yet to take care of weeds and clean it up well to start really growing this year. Perhaps I need to get off of the computer and go garden!!!