About the gardener
I’ve been wanting to try to grow vegetables and fruit for some time. Some of the nicest memories are when we arrived at my grandparents house, my sisters and I grabbed a pie tin, and rushed to the backyard to fill them with as many fresh raspberries as possible. It was hardly worth putting them in the tin as we probably ate them all before we made it back into the house.
When I travelled around Eastern Europe, sometimes out of the train you could see into people’s backyards. People were growing as much of their own food in the backyards as possible. I suppose it’s an old tradition that many people over the world felt was no longer “necessary” with supermarkets stocking things all year long. But growing your own food gives you a certain independence and also, I think, perhaps a certain respect for nature, and there’s something admirable in that.
I’ve never been “into” nature (in the sense of enjoying hikes or wondering overmuch at a sunset) but I like the practicality of growing, and hopefully preserving my own things. The control of growing a wide variety of things you can’t easily find at the grocery store, the ability to keep old flavors alive, the brighter fresher taste of foods allowed to ripen on the tree, the lighter step on the earth…
This is a catalog of my very first attempts. It will contain a lot of missteps and dead plants along the way, but hopefully also some of nature’s bounty in time!
ap269 said,
May 5, 2009 @ 1:42 am
I like the new theme. It looks pretty!