Kitchen Garden poll

I'm not so much planning a kitchen garden this year as assembling one out of whatever heirloom or cheap plants (or better yet, cheap heirloom plants) are wandering my way. So far, I've got half a hardy rosemary (Snowpocalypse killed half of it, but the rest is rebounding), 4 generic lettuces, a mortgage lifter tomato and (because he sold out after I'd been planning on buying three more mortgage lifters tonight, damnit) a Cherokee purple tomato.

And then there's the Montpelier Tea festival on Saturday that's supposed to have plants and after that, the wonders of the Maryland Sheep and Bankruptcy Festival.

Who wants to hear anything else about the kitchen garden?


[Poll #1558089]

Wow, I need a garden icon

Wow, I totally did not expect that response to the poll. It may tip again overnight, but for the surprising majority, I'll add this much:

I do not till the land. Tilling the land means sweat, sand, bugs, and exposure to poison ivy. I'm doing a variation on square-foot gardening in which I went down to the local gardening center and bought a bunch of containers that are roughly 1 cubic foot and filled them with a 50/50 mix of Miracle-gro moisture control soil and organic potting mix. (It is new dirt every year - I dump the old stuff in the garden where it looks like it might like some extra soil, but I also break it up and take out all the worms to drop in the new soil. Worms R Good.)

Although there is a little bit of yard that's literally right outside the kitchen door, it doesn't get any sun, so the plants are lined up under the picture window in my bedroom. Good southwestern exposure and (probably key in the rosemary's survival) getting some residual heat and shelter from the house.

I need to get some more parsley and dill seeds - I go through that stuff like wildfire, so this year I have vague ideas of planting in shifts if I can find the time - and other than that, there's a thornless blackberry that I picked up a year or so ago that has decided it will finally flower and then what I'm getting at the farmer's market. In April most of the people there are selling more plants than produce, and I'm not arguing. Not when I can buy a 4-pack of baby lettuce for $2.50 (up 50 cents from last year) and hand-sized heirloom tomato plants for $2-3.

And it looks like the variegated mint has come back, although I'm a bit suspicious about that pot. It was being invaded last year. Although I prefer peppermint, I'm trying not to buy a lot of stuff for the garden; if I have a burning need for fresh mint, there's some spearmint running wild in the area around the kitchen.

Unfortunately for my wallet, there's a used-cookbook salesman at the Thursday farmer's market as well. Doomed. I'm doomed. Especially as I'm trying to significantly up the veggie side of my diet. (In two weeks, there will be three operating farmer's markets in 7 miles of the house, with mostly reasonable prices and the ability to choose my portions to buy. There's really no excuse for my not going mostly cook-for-myself vegetarian until they shut down in November.) I'm still surprised at the number of cookbooks that call for convenience foods, though. Feh. The easiest and fastest way for me to drop calories and consumption of sodium and HFCS is to simply cut out as much processed food as possible. When I walk in from the market with a handful of tomatoes, mushrooms, and peppers, the last thing I need to see is "add 2 tablespoons of tomato paste."