Quote of the Day: Cottage Gardens
The genuine cottager began to be joined, towards the end of the eighteenth century, by members of the gentry seeking “the good life” – a simpler life nearer the soil but with money and independence to back them up. Our idea of cottage gardening today owes much to this trend and when we emulate the cottage-garden style, it is not because of the necessity to grow food, but because we are keen to adopt a free-and-easy style and to grow our vegetables on soil laced with dung and garden compost rather than with man-made fertilizers. Also it is because we want to foster some of our own wild flowers.
-Christoper Lloyd & Richard Bird (The Cottage Garden)
It’s interesting that growing your own food has always been a way for people to connect with nature and a more simple life. I enjoy it for so many reasons, mostly for the beauty that it brings. It certainly make me happy to see more and more people digging in the soil and planting a few edibles.
Do you notice more people growing edible gardens than in previous years?
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Quote of the Day: Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd
Vegetables gardens, rightly viewed, are much more than food factories. They are magic places, little worlds set apart from other domestic or horticultural concerns, realms of peace and order.
Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd in Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden and the Table at North Hill
I really love this book and this quote, because vegetables are truly different than other gardens. For me, vegetables are of top priority. If I had to choose, I’d choose vegetables over hydrangeas any day, though I’m glad I don’t have to.
Would you choose vegetables over ornamentals if you had to make a choice?
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Quote of the Day: Monty Don
“The herbs are essential to the kitchen and we aim to provide ourselves with a limitless supply of the principal herbs so that we can cook generously with them rather than treating them as a precious garnish.”
Monty Don from Fork to Fork
In my garden grow many herbs, they’re one of my favorite things to have around. There are culinary herbs, medicinal herbs and tea herbs. It would be very hard to me to sit down and list all of the herbs in my garden, there are far too many. Consider thyme, there are 15 different varieties of thyme growing at Chiot’s Run.
I use mass quantities of herbs every day, at every meal. Of all of the herbs I grow, lemon thyme is probably my most favorite. If I had to choose only it would win. A close second would be cilantro.
Do you grow lots of herbs in your garden? Which is your favorite?
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Quote of the Day: Jessica Prentice
Visiting a farmer’s market gives me a sense of the season and a direct connection with the people who spend their days growing food. Eating seasonally reconnects me to the natural pulse of life, the Earth’s annual cycle of cold and heat, wet and dry, long night and then long days as it makes it’s journey around the sun. These annual cycles make me more mindful of the eternal realities of birth growth, death, decay and rebirth. They keep me aware of my humanness and my mortality as well as my kinship and interdependence with all other life on earth.
Jessica Prentice – Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection
I used up my onions from last year’s garden long ago. Even though we’ve been eating scallions and chives, nothing is quite as good as sautéed onions. The smell alone make me happy. Since we moved late in the fall, I didn’t have any leeks planted in the garden to fill the gap between bulb onions and new onions. Thus, we’ve been onionless as I refuse to buy them if I can’t find them locally.
One of the reasons I refuse to buy them is because it makes it all the more exciting when they start to show up at the farmers market and when they can be harvest from the garden. It has been said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, that is certainly true for the humble onion. I was giddy with excitement when I spotted onions at the farmers market on Friday morning. I purchased 4 large white onions and a bunch of beautiful small red torpedo shaped onions. There’s nothing like scarcity to make us fully appreciate abundance!
My onions in the garden are doing quite well, they are finally starting to bulb, it will be interesting to see how many I harvest and how long they last in the cellar. I have a good number of leeks planted already, with more to go in the ground when I have a clear spot. My potato onions and shallots will also be harvest soon as well. I’m also harvesting ‘Mini Purplette’ onions I planted a few months ago.
This fall I’ll be ordering and planting more shallots as well to increase my allium collection. My goal is to be able to have some sort of allium from my garden on my plate every month of the year without having to grow massive quantities of bulbing onions. I want my diet to reflect the seasonal changes, leeks and overwintered bunching onions in spring and early summer, fresh bulb onions in throughout summer, fall and winter. Big fat leeks harvested from the icy soil in early winter and early spring. Learning to eat seasonally not only increases the variety in our diet, it also helps us stay in tune with the natural cycles.
What food do you miss most when it’s not in season?
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Quote of the Day: Organic Gardening
“Organic gardening is not a system of rules to abide by or be punished for breaking. It is a way of looking at the world. The garden is a model of how we would like to live. We should all garden organically not because it is currently politically correct but simply because it is the most sensible and best way to make a good garden.”
Monty Don from Fork to Fork
Even though the word “organic” is being watered down by corporate interest, it’s good to see more and more people becoming aware of the dangers of chemicals/pesticides and leaning toward gardening more organically.
How many of the gardeners you know are organic?
