El Jardin

This blog is a way for me to chronicle my first year being what I consider a "real" gardener. Example: up until last year I didn't know what the mysterious disease that kept killing my tomato plants was called. I've never planted carrots, peas, potatoes, lettuce, or beans. And I never had a real garden. But the winds of change began to blow late last summer after reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. That book began to change the way I thought about food, animals, and my future. After that a whole host of small things happened. I learned what CSA's were and became jealous, probably for the first time, of my aunt's eating habits. I started religious reading and re-reading seed catalogs. I started getting Organic Gardening. I started giving evil looks to those paltry, fake tomatoes in the grocery stores. I went to a Farmer's Market.All of these may seem small, but together they started my dreams of one day eating (almost) completely local food. My dreams of growing my own food and raising my own chickens and eating their eggs.