About a month ago, when I was still in the Boston area, I spent a day gardening with Kathy from Skippy’s Vegetable Garden (my favorite gardening blog). I had a great time, and I learned a lot from her about growing various vegetables. I gave her one of my cayenne seedlings (more on those in a later post), and in exchange she gave me two of her tomato seedlings. I planted them in pots on my fire escape and tended to them attentively; I definitely count myself amont the many gardeners who find tomatoes the most alluring of all garden vegetables. I brought tomato seedlings to DC when I moved down earlier this month, but for the last two weeks they have been in the care of my roommates while I went home to Olympia for a couple of weeks. I was happy to see that they are still in great shape:
When Kathy gave them to me they were cute, bitty little things, dwarfed by the terra cotta pots I put them in. When I brought them to DC 2 weeks later they were bigger, but still manageable for moving purposes. Now, after another two weeks (this time in the DC heat), they’ve outgrown their pots. After I took this picture I got some bigger pots and gave the tomatoes their new home. One is an heirloom variety, Purple Calabash, the other is a hybrid called Orange Blossom. I’m planning to get some sort of cherry or grape tomato plant to accompany them.
Gradually Greener 
Green and Leafy
Posted in Commentary, tagged housekeeping on June 27, 2008| 2 Comments »
It’s not easy to make monumental changes in your consumption patterns, even if you have strong beliefs motivating the change. Whether it’s veganism or buying only American-made, some lifestyles take a lot of effort if you’re aiming to be 100% pure about it. Some of the recent trends in environmental living – eating local, reducing one’s carbon footprint, etc – are ideas I’d like to adopt into my everyday life, at least to the extent that the constraints of time, geography, and personal finances allow. I’m not in a position to get religious about this, but I’m trying to make the sorts of incremental changes that eventually add up.
Tangentially, I’ve been bitten by the gardening bug. For the last two summers (both in DC), I’ve grown vegetables and herbs in containers and really got a lot of pleasure out of it. Some details of these previous exploits can be found here and here. This past spring in Boston I grew some plants from seed, and now that I’ve returned to DC I’m very excited to be gardening again. It’ll mostly be container gardening again this season, but perhaps in the future I’ll get a plot at a local community garden. I’m still a novice gardener, but I’m learning more all the time.
This is all to say that the theme of this blog will be primarily about my gardening adventures, with a bit of local eating and general foodie-ness thrown in. I can’t wait to get started.
Baby spinach grown on my fire escape back in Boston, local bread, non-local Bucheron.
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