Gardening

I've been interested in growing things my whole life. I remember at the age of four how dismayed I was when my grandparents took out the flower garden next to the house and concreted that space to keep water from seeping into their basement and it always dismays me to hear of someone dismissively removing trees and shrubs simply because they're tired of them.

Several years ago I was fortunate enough to live on an acreage in Central Oklahoma where I had some chickens, a good sized garden with plenty of vegetables and a smaller (but still sizable) garden where we rotated garlic and tomatoes. I made flower jellies from Honey Locust and Dandelion flowers, which I could only do because I knew they had not been chemically treated. Then, seven years ago we moved to a small village in Central New York.

Up here it's two or three zones colder than where I grew up and while I love the cool green summers in Central New York, I haven't quite gotten the knack of growing my familiars in this short, cool growing season. Also, here in the village, my so-called garden is more postage-stamp sized than the all-the-room-you-want garden I had in Oklahoma. I have been able to grow horseradish, chives, mint, lemon balm, parsley, basil, a little bit of garlic - I had a pair of blueberry bushes, too, but we had some work done on the house and I haven't seen the blueberry bushes since the heavy equipment left. As I write, the yard and my tiny rectangle of garden are firmly covered with twelve to eighteen inches of snow.

I thought we'd spend the rest of our lives here, but as it happens, fortune has favored us in that someone has bought our house and we're moving back to Zone 7, to the very acreage we left when we moved up here. I am ecstatic!

I've already researched late season plantings and average frost dates and see that, getting back there in late May or even early June, I can still get several late season plantings going as soon as we get back and be eating some of our own food again by winter.

Onward and upward!