Every day that passes brings the gardening season that much closer (fingers crossed that we’re done with snow). To while away the time I’ve become hooked on something I read about over at You Grow Girl several months ago… Gardening Mama! It’s a game from the people who making Cooking Mama, which I also obsessively love, but more than that, it keeps my hands busy while I’m waiting for the universe to hurry up and warm up outside already…
Though I may have let the past few months pass in relative silence on the garden front, you can be assured that I’ve not been dormant. From taking my seed catalogs with me on Christmas vacation so I could pick out my new projects (yes, I am a garden dork and I was mocked mercilessly about it the entire vacation), to harassing the people at West Coast Seeds when an order didn’t arrive, to finally breaking out the potting soil and mucking about in my basement laundry room, the last 3 months contained their fair share of preparatory activities.
Project Sustainability 2009 is well underway, with approximately 60 seedlings chilling out on the grow tower. Considering that last year was my first attempt at growing anything more involved than a cactus, I was pretty impressed with the end results. There were definitely lessons learned, and notes made about plants I wouldn’t bother to grow again (read: corn and those weeds I thought were beans). But this year, along with bringing back favorites and successes from 2008, I also picked a bunch of new plants to try. As our diet becomes increasingly varied, the memories of how explosively flavorful my completely organic, fresh picked produce was last year inspired me to try my hand at even more. I can never replace Bob (our organic delivery guy) or our CSA farmshare from Zephyr Organics, but being able to combine two of my all-consuming passions is just too good to pass up. Plus, creating your own tiny microcosm means being able to experiment with more unique and just plain bizarre produce that larger growers might not bother with.
So far on the rooftop roster this year we have:
