Grow Your Own!

We did it! We planted a winter garden. The seeds have been in the ground for two weeks tomorrow and there are a lot of seedlings pushing up through the soil.

Back in September Mr. Green and I had a conversation with our farmer friend Elijah from Tara Firma Farms about how we could make our garden more productive. He offered to take a look at our space. One beautiful Sunday in early October Elijah came to the city and saw our garden. He loved it! He said it was enough space to feed 20 people!

Yikes! Who knew?

He suggested that we orient the whole thing differently to waste less space and said we needed soil amendments. Our poor plants were being choked by the sand. He said, "Find a friend who has cow manure and get a lot of it." Now, I have friends who have, or can get, cow manure. Lots of them. They all live in Idaho. Shipping really isn't an option.

Craigslist is the next best thing to someone you know who has what you need. I signed on later that evening and found a listing for "aged organic horse manure" for fifty cents a bag. . . fifty cents a bag? That fits right into my budget. I sent an email to Victoria's Fashion Stables ordering up six bags and "Voila!" they would be left outside the gate, on the appropriate day, just for me.

The soil was a different story. Tons of "dirt" or "fill dirt" available. . . immediate concerns about contamination. . . I don't want to sully our clean growing space. We were very careful in the spring to keep it "organic". So. . . I invested in six bags of organic planting mixture from Sloat Garden Center. At eight-something a bag, it was a bit much, but worth it, I hope.

We now were driving around with six fragrant bags of horse manure in the back of the truck and six bags of soil stacked in our garage. I was looking forward to the next weekend!

Earlier in the season, about a week after we had pretty much given up on our summer garden - having pulled the tomatoes, and harvested every bit of produce except the carrots and artichokes, it rained. I was ignoring the garden at that point. Nothing new going on. We were waiting for advice.

And suddenly, there was oxalis! We hadn't really seen any since we sifted all the sand and took out all the bulbs in the spring. It wasn't as bad as it was last fall, but it definitely was making itself known. We weeded. The damn stuff is impossible to pull up completely. It breaks off so easily and then comes right back. If it flowers and goes to seed, it's everywhere. We weeded some more.

The morning of beginning the winter gardening, we weeded. . . then the fun began.

We drug and carried the six bags of manure and six bags of mulch through the 1st floor hallway into the back. Then we stripped the earth of everything except the two artichoke plants. We turned it all over once with a shovel. I don't know where the eight bags of mulch from last spring went, but the soil was very sandy.

We poured out two bags of poo and two bags of mulch, mixed it up with the fork and shoveled it out onto the garden. We did this three more times.

It may not seem like a lot of work reading it, but it was. The garden is mostly in the shade in the winter because it's on the north side of our three story building. This was a good thing that sunny day. After the "amendments" were evenly spread, we turned the soil over again. Twice.

Then we raked a path down the middle, leaving a large bed on each side, and lined the path with some of the bags that the manure came in.

Mr. Green mixed up some of his magic "adobe" to pack on the sides of the beds - this combo of sand, mulch, compost and water mixed to create mud, we discovered, keeps the dirt contained and doesn't allow run-off, creating our poor-man's version of raised beds.

By this time it was late in the day and cooling off quickly. I was exhausted but happy to have the garden ready to plant.

On Sunday we planted.

peas peas

artichokes carrots

turnips lettuce

radishes spinach

beets garlic

broccoli cauliflower

cabbage

And garlic planted along the edges of the garden about every two feet to keep the bugs out. But not by the peas. Peas and garlic are not friends. The way I planted (as listed above) is companion planting. all these plants like their neighbors and, because they do, we are supposed to get a higher yield.

I have never companion planted before. I'm excited to see if it works. I found a handy dandy chart on a site called Gardens Ablaze. Just a matter of plotting it out once I knew which plants are friendly with which.

Again, another exhausting day, but fun work. We planted, watered the seed, cleaned up the mess, hung the tools and called it a day well spent.

I tagged each area that I planted with the date and what is growing. Mr. Green made worm tea and sprayed the whole thing the next day.

At this point, two weeks later, we have a bounty of seedlings. The turnips and radishes are up and crankin'. Almost everything is popping through except the carrots, beets and garlic. . . I'm sure they will be up by the end of the week. Awesome!

I doubt that we'll be feeding twenty people, but there will definitely be food to share. Assuming that we don't end up sharing it with the snails and bugs. . . we have plans for them if they show up. . .

We do this because we can. I like growing my own food. Between the farmers' market and our garden, we keep it local most of the time, supplementing with a trip to the co-op or regular grocery a couple of times a month.

I like to think that more and more of us are on the path to sustainable living. I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it.

I'm sure you are, too.

Do you grown your own? Would love to hear about your winter (or summer) garden!

A Winter Garden

I get that this photo doesn't seem too impressive, but it is. These tomatoes were grown in the Outer Sunset in SF. Something everyone said couldn't be done. And, they are not the specially formulated "fog" tomatoes, either - which I hear don't taste like much. Ours, being smaller than usual, are like the dry land Early Girls that are now available at the Alemany Farmer's Market, full of intense tomato flavor. Yum.

This is the handful I picked yesterday. I ate them sliced on toast - one of my favorite breakfasts! We've had probably four or five other handfuls of tomatoes. . . not much fruit considering how big the plants are. Next year we will definitely trim them back. I've never trimmed a tomato plant in my life, but, considering our small garden space, it makes sense. The plants got absolutely giant this year, shading the peppers we planted in front of them. Not good. The peppers aren't going to produce squat.

We have already started our winter garden. I had visions of the summer garden being over, reworking the whole space and then planting the winter garden. Actually, there is overlap. The tomatoes aren't done yet and the sunny months are just coming on. I don't want to tear them out. We have beautiful carrots on their way (the 2nd batch) and lettuce, too.

We did tear out the zucchini and summer squash plants. We had beautiful zucchini. We ate it as-is and in a variety of recipes including zucchini bread. Made a loaf with almonds for Mr. Green. It was interesting. I'm not a big fan of nuts in bread - or nuts in anything, really. He liked it, I think. He didn't rave about it, or complain. It got eaten. The Zucchini Orzo recipe from Animal Vegetable Miracle is definitely a fav. We made it twice!

Summer squash didn't do so well. For some reason the squash would come on and then rot starting on the end before they were big enough to bother picking. Too bad. We threw away alot hoping that the next round would be OK. Not sure what to do about that. Skip it or fix it. Maybe if we spray the plants with worm tea earlier. . .

I'm so excited about being able to grow food in the winter! I've been in San Francisco for a year now. Looking out the window at this moment, the sun is shining in the Sunset today! A rarity, but I wouldn't trade this for anything! It's great fun being in a large city and our tiny garden is part of my new Urban Experience.

In Idaho this is the time of year when we glean the garden for anything even remotely ready to eat and hope the killing frost holds off for a few more days. It is such a joy for me to be able to bike to work and walk out of my office at lunch to stand in the warm sun. And I love the thought of looking out at a green garden all winter. Of course, the rain will come, but not for a few weeks longer. . .

Speaking of rain, it is my hope that we will use very little water on the winter garden. Mr. Green has already prepped the dirt for the next round of planting. He's worked in another round of compost and worm tea where the squashes, carrots and radishes were. Over the next couple of weekends we will put in shell peas (these are delicious and hard to get at the Farmers' Market - very short season), broccolini (I like it better than the regular), turnips (Mr. Green likes these), cauliflower, and garlic. We've already planted spinach (the second round), cabbages, carrots, lettuce and artichokes.

We planted three artichoke plants. There were all exactly the same to start with. Now two are thriving and more than a foot tall. I swear the other one hasn't grown since the day I planted it. It's still green but has only one set of leaves past it's seed leaves. At first I figured it would come along. Some plants do better than others. Now I've decided it's just a dud and I'm going to replace it with another one. The only thing I can figure is I was too rough on it getting it out of it's container. I'll be very careful with the next one.

Interesting phenomenon in our garden - we noticed that the plants in the front of the rows are taller than the plants further back. This is not the norm, which would be the opposite, and we puzzled over it briefly while we weeded a few weeks back. Were we being so careful to water the front that the plants were doing better? Did we work in more mulch or compost in the front?

Actually, it is the cement wall that is the front of our garden. It gets hot when the sun shines and then keeps the soil warm over night. The plants do better that are closest to the wall. Mr. Green says he's going to cover our fence with reflective material that will turn the garden into a tropical paradise when the sun shines - or at least heat things up a lot more. I'm envisioning something along the lines of those tanning sheets we all used to lay in the sun on back in the early 80's - before we knew better.

A novel idea, don't you think? I'll keep you posted.

Guerilla Gardening in Portland

A friend of a friend posted the story below on Facebook. Mr. Green wrote to him and he was kind enough to lend this version of it to us to post. It's a true story, well written and worth the read. . . Enjoy! And, thank you David for sharing the experience.

A block from my downtown Portland apartment, there’s an easement about five feet wide and half a block long, which divides a parking lot from the sidewalk. Recent city ordinances call for such an amenity around all new lots, but of course most of them are older than the ordinance and comply only partially, if at all.

For most of the four years I’ve lived in the neighborhood, this one has been nothing more than a strip for weeds, trash, and dog poop. It got cleaned up a little earlier this year, and some bark was laid in, but that was all.

Several weeks ago, my wife and I noticed that someone had planted vegetables along a portion of the strip. There were several tomato plants, some beans, a chili pepper, a jalapeno, an eggplant, possibly a cucumber -- about sixteen in all. Although I took a similar number of non-food-bearing plants nearby for part of the same plot, it turned out they were not connected to the guerilla planting.

We gave the vegetable plants less than a 50-50 chance of survival: most likely, the homeless people in the neighborhood would steal the edibles and trample the plants before they were ripe, we thought.

The weekend of July 25-26, I noticed the plants had grown, but were looking pretty dry, and in some cases flattened. They didn’t appear to have been watered at all. Record heat was forecast for the coming week; three days later, temperatures hit 107 and remained in three digits -- rare for Portland -- for several days straight.

I decided to help ’em out. I borrowed a key from my building’s maintenance guy and filled a pair of my own buckets, repeatedly, at one of the exterior spigots along the outer walls of our building, and walked diagonally across an intersection to get to the parched greenery. It took five trips, with 2-1/4 gallon buckets, to water all the plants in the strip -- maybe a total of 22 gallons.

I’ve never had much of a green thumb, but I had been laid off my five-year-old job the week before, so I had plenty of time on my hands. For two days I watered the plants. On the third day I found the first sign that somebody else cared about them: the tomatoes had been staked so they now stood up to two feet in the air.

There were also several printed paper signs among the plants that had the parking lot’s logo at the top and read:

“Dear Enthusiast,

“This area is not intended as a vegetable garden. Please remove all plants by Monday, August 3^rd. If you fail to do so, we will be forced to remove them.

“Thank you for you [sic] cooperation.”

Would be “forced” to remove them? Because the strip had been despoiled after being so attractive and productive before? Because someone was stealing invaluable soil nutrients that until now had provided an exquisite cushion for litter and animal waste? Was the owner worried that someone might eat the vegetables, get sick, and sue; or, worse, sell the goods at a profit?

I had to admit it was refreshing to see “enthusiast” employed as a pejorative term.

I still had no idea who planted the vegetables. I thought it might have been someone from the church that abuts the lot. I rather indignantly watered them a third time on that hottest day of the year, and a fourth time the morning of the fifth day.

Having just read a new biography of Camus, I was primed to view the situation as a classic illustration of an existential response to the absurd: no one seemed to want to take responsibility for the situation, and the end was foreordained.

There was no sign of a planter who might move the plants to a safer location, but a Big Brother warning set a hard deadline. Thus, my choice to water the plants was an “acte gratuit” -- a senseless move in the face of certain doom.

Still smarting with indignation, I wrote up an account of the situation and fired it off to the op-ed team of the Portland daily, The Oregonian. The online op-ed editor, charmed by the Camus reference, requested a photo of the plants (I made certain to include the warning sign) and put the piece online that very afternoon, July 30. It garnered some lively comments that were mostly supportive:

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/07/my_guerilla_plantwatering_camp.html

The print edition the following morning called attention to my piece, and directed readers to the online essay.

As I continued my one-man bucket brigade, passersby had told me they’d been worried about the garden and were happy to see me watering “my” plants. They were astonished when I responded that they weren’t my plants; I didn’t know whose they were.

A homeless man making his way slowly by saw me pouring buckets of water on the plants and said, “Doin’ it the hard way … whatever works.” A moment later, almost approvingly, he added: “You might get a tomato.”

It was only late on the evening of the sixth day that I heard from the original “perps.” A student wrote me an email praising my online essay and revealing that kids from the local college had planted the vegetables. They were members of a summer class devoted to the topic of “revolution and radical social change.”

He asked me not to identify the class or even the college, because most of the students (and even the instructor) were worried about potential legal and academic effects upon their careers if they were to be identified.

I responded that I would have failed each and every student in the class who did not wish to have their activities and the course publicized, for they evidently hadn’t learned the first thing about revolution and social change. It doesn’t happen unless and until you put your ass on the line, and risk something.

If the instructor felt the same way, then he shouldn’t be teaching the course, I continued. To take action without being willing to take any responsibility for it was a violation of revolutionary principles; it’s precisely what has made so many would-be revolutionaries a laughingstock throughout history. The class’s action seemed to me as funny as it was pathetic.

I asked what the class had intended to do -- or not do -- with the plants. Was planting the garden and not bothering to water it part of the point? Were they just trying to see whether anyone would notice?

I didn’t receive any answers before the Monday deadline. When that came, it was over quickly.

My fear had been that I would be too late. I was afraid the property owner, having noticed that someone had seen what was going on, would send out an employee to tear up the plants in the wee hours of the morning in order to avoid confrontation and further publicity.

But when I got up the morning of August 3, I could see from my sixth-floor apartment window that the plants on the next block were undisturbed. Preparing for a long day, I packed a folding deck chair, books to read, some munchies and a thermos of ice water, and a digital camera to record whatever was going to happen.

I swung by the Starbucks downstairs and fumed silently in a line of caffeine addicts as the clock ticked up to 8:00 a.m. By 8:03 I was on site. Everything was undisturbed.

By now, though I had not planted the garden and it certainly wasn’t on my property, I had a proprietary interest in the plot (in more than one sense). Over the preceding week, I had lugged an estimated 115 gallons of water -- in buckets, by hand -- about 80 yards from my block to the garden.

I decided to take photos of each of the plants at their (possible) zenith. There were beans showing, a few green tomatoes, tiny jalapenos, and a tiny but richly purpled eggplant.

I was only halfway through photographing all the plants when a young woman in a white shirt and black trousers arrived and informed me that she had been tasked with tearing them out. We left signs saying people had until Monday to remove them, she informed me. Most of them have blown away, but here’s one, she said, pointing to a paper sign I had carefully preserved on a tomato stake, and around which I had watered, the past four days.

That’s fine, I said. I’m just going to take pictures of you while you do it. Assuring her they were not my plants, I asked for a contact phone number for her employer, which she gave me. She said “the church” had also requested the plants be removed.

That surprised me. As I said earlier, I had initially thought the planters might be members of the congregation of the neighboring church. If they hadn’t planted the vegetables and probably didn’t own the lot, why would they care that someone else had?

As the woman bent to her job, she said, “I really don’t want to do this. It’s a damn shame.” I settled in my deck chair with my vanilla latte and blueberry scone. As the woman gently pulled up the vegetables and placed them in a black garbage bag, I took a few photos.

When she had finished and turned to leave, she said (rather grimly I thought), “Have a good day.” It was all over by 8:15. No friends had come by, no passing cars honked, no TV crews showed up (though I had emailed the local stations about this late the night before).

Somewhat happily, only the vegetables were gone; the other plants were apparently not part of the guerilla garden and were allowed to stay. I found out later they are probably part of the property owner’s compliance with city ordinance.

I went home and made some calls. A heavily accented gentleman at the abutting church said nobody knew anything about the vegetable garden, and he did not think anyone there had requested it be removed.

A friend who works for the city did some digging and found that taxes on the property are paid by a different, much larger church that sits on the next block to the north of the parking lot and soil strip. The number the employee had given me rang at the offices of a huge downtown parking and development company, which presumably manages the lot on behalf of the church.

When I finally heard back from my contact in the class, he explained that the vegetable plot had not been a “class project.” The students and instructor had designed a curriculum together at the start, and agreed to act and approve projects by consensus. Everything had to be legal and ethical.

Apparently, the class had not approved the vegetable garden project; I think the proposers may have asked the church’s permission up front and failed to receive it. They went ahead and planted without the approval and support of their classmates and the instructor, as well as the church.

My email contact admitted that he had scoffed at the garden proposal -- how could planting a vegetable garden in famously green and eco-friendly Portland constitute a radical act? -- and had been taken aback by the attention it had gotten.

He personally agreed with pretty much everything I had written, he said; the word he chose for his classmates’ behavior in trying to duck recognition was “craven.” But since he had contacted me (also without consulting the group first and obtaining permission) and thereby brought unwanted attention to his classmates and the instructor, with potential legal and academic repercussions -- still pretty small, in my and his estimation -- he was now being regarded as a Judas by his fellow students.

They did not want me coming to their class to speak, which he had proposed the week before -- apparently because it might blow their cover. It was very amusing to me to be treated like a bomb-throwing anarchist with a mile-long FBI file when all I had done was . . . water some plants and then talk about it.

Meanwhile, the print edition op-ed editor for the Oregonian had called me and requested a 500-word summation of the caper for the print edition. That ran on Wednesday, August 5, and again garnered many reader comments, mostly in support:

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/08/urban_gardening_an_impossible.html

It’s easy to hate the property owners, but I’m not convinced that anyone came out of this with clean hands. Even though the vegetable garden was a lovely revolutionary act, much applauded by the public to whose attention I brought it, the planters acted against the consensus of their group (another common violation of revolutionary principles), and I have a hard time seeing what they managed to accomplish without my intervention.

Several months ago, the manager of my apartment building acquired a third dog, a lovely dachsund, to go with his two basenjis, when he witnessed someone abandon it in the nearby park. People have been breeding dogs and trying to sell the puppies on Craigslist, he told me, but when the animals get too big, they just dump them.

What the college planters did looks pretty much the same to me. They seem to have abandoned the plants. Knowing the property owner was likely to come after their work, and having been informed roughly when it would happen, they didn’t appear to have devised any strategy to witness the deed, let alone rally support to stop it.

Plenty of folks, both strangers on the Oregonian’s Web site and Facebook friends who read my reports via that venue, applauded my efforts, but no one stepped up with a solution. I suspect if I had beat the bushes and pleaded, someone might have come up with a safe plot to which the plants could have been moved. But that was part of the point I wanted to make: if we’re going to be a community, everyone has to contribute ideas and labor. And they weren’t my plants.

On the other hand, a friend told me this morning that if it had been a 20-year-old tree -- something with more of a history -- she might have made more of an effort to find an alternative lot for it. Also, situated where they were, these vegetables would likely have had a high lead content. Another friend directed me to an essay by an longtime gardening activist who decried folks that attack guerilla gardening with good intentions and verve but virtually no gardening skills:

http://dooneyscafe.com/archives/402

And I? Well, I was guiltily pleased that I didn’t have to sit out in the hot sun all day but could return to my air-conditioned apartment and go back to looking for a job. I got some published writing and quite a few strokes from friends and strangers out of the deal.

There’s a maxim from Tertullian regarding faith: credo quia absurdum est, which means (given that faith cannot be proven or justified by reason): “I believe because it is absurd.”

My attitude as illustrated by this caper would be somewhat similar: “I take action because it is futile.” My college roommate, a classics major, emailed me that the Latin version might be ago quia futile est.

That encapsulates my perspective at many levels, whether it’s watering the guerilla garden, my little, brief life on this planet, or the survival of the human species and the rest of life as we know it.

With so many powerful interests working hard to make us into mere consumers and spectators (at worst, voyeurs), it’s important to act and speak up, even if it’s only to give others a chance to teach you where you’re wrong.

Otherwise, you’re not learning and growing; you’re just opening your mouth for someone else’s spoons.

The story and photos above are by David Loftus who is an actor and writer living in Portland, Oregon.Samples of his writing and voice acting work may be found on his Web site at www.david-loftus.com.

Urban Gardeners

This is our small urban garden. Even though we are on the third floor, we are the only non-commercial residents in the building so we get access to the small rectangle of dirt in our "backyard". We get to our spot of green by climbing down the fire escape. It's a beautiful, warm inviting spot of about 200 square feet with a palm tree on one end.

We (I) decided we should turn the patch of oxalis "out back" into a garden in early April. I guess that's when the gardening bug hits for someone from Idaho. What I have learned since then is that people start their gardens in March here in San Francisco! Who Knew?! The only thing my inner clock inspires me to do in March is build another fire in the fireplace.

The really amazing thing for me about the garden space is that it sat fallow for six years. Nothing was done with it. The only thing that grew there was oxalis season after season. A very clean plot of dirt for a city gardener! I would even venture to say "organic".

Mr. Green agreed to the garden - a bit reluctantly - and the fun began. We did some internet research to find out about getting rid of the oxalis. What we found out was it's almost impossible to get rid of. In order to really make it go away you have to dig down twelve inches and sift the dirt, throwing away all the bulbs. Then you have to weed it consistently, never letting even one plant bloom. After five years, it will be gone. Yes, I said five years.

Undeterred, we pressed on. The next weekend just happened to be sunny and beautiful. We borrowed a shovel from our neighbor and descended the fire escape. It really didn't take very long to get the almost solid green matt of plant matter off the top of the soil. I only wish I would have taken a picture before we removed it! In the shot below you can see some of it piled on the patio. Needless to say, there was a lot.

The shot above is during the sifting process. We went to Home Depot and bought a piece of screen. The ingenious Mr. Green cut the bottom off an old trash can and made a huge sifter with the help of some scissors and duct tape. Sifting consisted of one of us shoveling three shovels of dirt onto the screen and the other rocking the can back and forth until all the dirt sifted through, leaving a ridiculous amount of oxalis bulbs to remove. We worked two or three inches of forest mulch into the top six inches of soil as we went. The forest mulch bags made great containers for the bulbs and they, and all the plant matter, got hauled to the compost pile at the dump the next weekend.

It took an entire weekend and two evenings just to sift the dirt. Quite the arm workout. We came in each evening covered in a fine coat of dust with streaks of mud on our arms and faces and barely able to lift our arms. And yet, I have to say that it was much easier than it would have been with the soil I'm used to in Idaho. The Outer Sunset soil has a lot of sand - because it used to be a sand dune - and was very easy to sift - no clay, no clods. We did find some construction debris. Hunks of cement, pieces of tile, nails, etc. We managed to get the whole thing sifted, mulched, organized into rows and planted in two weekends plus three

evenings.

During the process Mr. Green fell in love with, and took total ownership of, the garden. I came home from work on the Monday after we planted and he said we were going to have to do something about the cat. He caught her digging and chased her out. Seems she thought we were creating a huge sandbox just for her. By Tuesday evening, after online research by Mr. Green, we were the proud owners of a "ScareCrow" (see top picture). This amazing, and odd looking, device was just what we needed. Hooked to the hose, and set in the front edge of the garden, it watches. If something enters its line of site and triggers its infrared eye, the rainbird attached to the top sprays back and forth really fast three times. Scared the crap out of me! To see a description click here: ScareCrow. Mr. Green bought ours at Orchard Supply Hardware OSH which I hear is a pretty cool store. I've only forgotten to turn it off twice. . . and yes, I got wet both times.

The cat only got wet once. It was in the middle of the night and she promptly came in and hopped up on the bed to let us know. She steers clear of the whole space now. She goes down with us and hangs out while we are weeding or walks the fence line and sits looking down at us, but she doesn't get near the dirt. Smart cat.

Below is the progression from sifting to organizing to planting.

We planted all organic plants and seeds, mostly from Sloats Garden Center Click Here. They are a bit pricey, but just down the street. We made the rows so it would be easy to weed, planted every other one. We were expecting A Lot of oxalis. We covered the "walking rows" with some brown paper on a roll (very similar to grocery sacks) that Mr. Green had.

Then we waited. This was not easy for Mr. Green. Being a new gardener he wanted everything to come up right now. The first week he commented that he certainly understood why people bought plants instead of planting seeds. . . for the instant reward of seeing green in the dirt!

With a couple of rounds of weeding and Mr. Green's TLC the garden has flourished over time and we now have tomatoes in bloom (Everyone says we won't get tomatoes, but I'm holding out for enough sun in July!), 3 types of beans in bloom (these little buggers were supposed to be bush beans, but they are All Over the place.), beets that are about an inch and a half in diameter (I've never planted beets before and can't wait to EAT them), scallions almost ready to eat (also a new plant for me) and four different kinds of peppers in bloom (these guys seem small to me, but, hey they are blooming), cucumbers (also a bit small) and a pathetic stand of carrots. I've never had great success with carrots. My dad could grow them like crazy and used to give me a couple big bags each fall (out of sympathy, I think). OH, and Squash! Looks like the plant from Little Shop of Horrors!

So far we have picked three batches of spinach, which grows really really well here. Delicious! We've had salad & also steamed a bunch. I'll pick the last batch off these plants on the weekend and then start over with fresh seed. Mr. Green has also enjoyed a pile of radishes & already replanted them. I'm not a huge radish fan. He loves them. The second batch of the season is coming along well.

The best part of the garden is coming home from work, pouring a glass of wine, sitting on the 2nd story balcony in the late afternoon sun and chatting while we watch it grow. I realize, just now, that this is what my parents used to do when my dad would get home from work in the summer. Only they were looking out at 80 acres of farmland. I used to join them. We are creatures of habit, aren't we? Makes me smile.

I'm so looking forward to the larger produce!

I love touching the dirt. If you have a spot of land, plant a garden. It's a great way to get your earth fix.

Oh, and the Oxalis? Literally haven't seen more than one or two plants while weeding. Guess that whole sifting thing was worth all the effort!