A Roundup

A few things I've read lately on other blogs that I like:

• A funny story about having a homestead with no running water (thanks for the laugh, Mamma Pea!)
• A great blog post about growing your own food...I feel this, I've been asked a bunch this year why we're growing so much food and if we actually think we're going to eat all this!
• The US isn't the only country losing its farming herritige. France is also having problems. Have a look at this great blog post about local farms and CSAs in France, which garnered this wonderful line: "...[food] that's so good I want to marry the person who made it and dedicate my life to somehow returning the favor." I've had food like that, haven't you?
• Just a reminder that I'm doing a book giveaway here, and I have a list of seeds I would LOVE to send you here.
• A post from the daughter of a coworker who is with the Peace Corps in the Ukraine right now. She is in the 'immersion' part of the program right now, staying with a family that speaks no English. She is very proud of herself: She cooked tea!

Tomorrow, I will post about what I've been cooking and/or making recently. With PICTURES! Stay tuned.

New Website Added

I added a new website resource to my list today. It is the Urban Garden Casual: gardening for the urban dweller, a really cool site I just stumbled on.

Be sure to read their post on Lasagna Gardening and There are Cats in My Garden!

Stay tuned for a few new updates including "I'm Leeky!"

Toronto Gal on a Mission

I’m slowly adding links on the side of the page, these will include places I order seeds or plants from, local greenhouses, local farmers markets and other food markets, and also nice informational websites or blogs as I come across them. I’ll write about them as the mood strikes me.

The one I read daily and just adore is You Grow Girl, a gardening blog by Gayla Trail. She lives in an apartment in Toronto (ATTENTION TIM), and operates several gardens within the city. Make sure you read that correctly: WITHIN the city. She has two plots in two community gardens, she has a container garden on the roof area of her apartment, and she operates a few guerilla gardens as well.

Gayla has been operating the website for about 8 years, and also has a book of the same name that is on my Amazon list of things I need to get. There is an amazing amount of content in her website and while I haven’t looked at them there are also forums to gab with other gardeners and trade tips and stories. She has also been featured in a few magazines, a couple tv and radio clips, and has traveled to various cities in Canada and the US for speaking engagements. I believe her ‘real’ job is as a graphic designer, which you can see in her beautiful website and photos.

Not living in the city, I am most intrigued by her guerilla/street gardens. Basically, she seeds and plants a small plot of ground that would usually be infested with weeds. She can’t grow edibles there, though, because people often use these plots for other things. It is a curious way to brighten a cityscape. It sounds like something I’d do if I lived in a city.

One of the things I like most about reading the blog is that while she lives in the city, which in and of itself makes space per person limited, she makes it all sound so do-able (not necessarily easy, but do-able) for the everyday person, no matter where you live. And you can’t help but be bitten by her enthusiasm and humor.

Last fall, she posted about the Great Canadian Garlic Collection. You can read the details yourself, but basically many gardeners from all around Canada agreed to grow 3 different varieties of garlic for 2 years in order to collect data about which varieties do well in which parts of the country. She writes about her problem planning a garden out, and as you know I grow garlic. Last fall at this same time I was planning out how to plant my 400+ plants, so I emailed her directly and we compared notes. It was nice to have someone to email that gets the same thrill about it that I do.

So head on over to You Grow Girl and take a look at what Gayla’s writing about this week.