I paused today when I read a great line in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Barbara Kingsolver writes, “…to many urban people the idea of growing your food must seem as plausible as writing and conducting your own symphonies for your personal listening pleasure.” Certain vegetables like the difficult-to-grow celery will certainly make the novice give up prematurely. (Start with zucchini.) But many people are returning to the backyard garden, if more for the rising food prices than the nostalgia. As for me, I’m thrifty and a sucker for romance, so that’s why my seed catalogs sit dog eared next to my Bible. There are flowers in heaven.

IMG 1552Here in Florida, gardening is done for the season. I picked the last tomatoes this week, and we chopped them up for today’s lunch, tacos. I’m chomping at the bit to get started at our new place. I laid out a garden plan for next year. We plan to lime and sow a cover crop as soon as we get there this August, so things will be ready in the spring. I’m driving my husband crazy. I see berries and daffodils in my dreams and all he sees is PVC pipe and an aching back.

Here’s my kitchen garden plan, subject to what-are-you-thinking from folks who know more about Kentucky’s peculiarities. It’s a draft, and I will ask my neighbors for advice. North is on the left.

Planting Plan

It’s kind of hard to read, sorry. If you think this is ambitious, you should see my berry and orchard plan. I know, I know. I need to make it a four-year plan, not a four-day one. If you are new to gardening, it is no big loss to mess up with seeds, but you should always take time and care when adding berries and trees. They cost a lot more. Start small and then you can talk your husband into buying you a farm. Not that I know anything about that.

Here are my muscadine grapes. If you can’t grow these, there’s something wrong with your thumb. You can literally stick them in the ground and walk away. You just hack it to the ground after harvest, make several grapevine wreaths so you can feel crunchy, and that’s it.

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I usually link these articles in the sidebar, but I wanted to highlight it. Gardening isn’t just good for your soul; it’s also good for your pocketbook. (If you can get stuff to grow. I know about failure.) Here’s something you can do about peak oil, the depressing economy, and higher food prices.

From By Anne Marie Chaker’s article, The Vegetable Patch Takes Root, in the Wall Street Journal this week:

More families are looking right under their feet to ease the problem of high food prices. As consumers balk at the rising cost of groceries, homeowners increasingly are cutting out sections of lawn and retiring flower beds to grow their own food. They’re building raised vegetable beds, turning their spare time over to gardening, and doing battle with insect pests.

At Al’s Garden Center in Portland, Ore., sales of vegetable plants this season have jumped an unprecedented 43% from a year earlier, and sales of fruit-producing trees and shrubs are up 17%. […]

The grow-your-own trend comes as the price of food has skyrocketed. The government recently reported that April’s 0.9% increase in food prices from the previous month was the fastest pace in 18 years […]

Bruce Butterfield, the association’s research director, expects 2008 will be another strong year for vegetable gardening thanks to “the combination of gas prices, food prices, and people staying at home because the world’s gone crazy,” he says. “At least they can have some control over their backyard.” [Amy: I love that phrase, “…people staying at home because the world's gone crazy.”]

[…] “I’m in no way a tie-dye wearing granola hippie,” says Garden Grove resident Dylan T. Boyd, a vice president at an email marketing company and father to two small boys. “But I was looking at the price of blueberries the other day — $5 for a fistful. I thought, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”

While it’s a time commitment, he says, the payback is far greater. “It’s so much easier to walk to the top of the street and grab your lettuce and tomatoes for dinner, fresh every day.”

If you want to feed your soul, why not try some zinnias? My eight-year-old sowed these for me a little too closely, but the beautiful thing is that we don’t have to pull many weeds. When plants grow close together the mature leaves shade out the weeds below. All this beauty for two dollars for seeds and an ice cream cone for your sweet daughter who wants to score big?

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