Stopping to Think

Jerry Baker's Great Green Book of Garden Secrets by Jerry Baker My rating: 2 of 5 stars There were a few helpful tips and ideas in this book (although I'm not sure if coke on my plants did a whole lot...), but much of it was redundant. This book could have been fit into about 100 pages and contained just as much information, had there simply been a useful index added in the back. Instead, recipes and suggestions were repeated ad nauseam. My copy will probably be making the trek to Goodwill. View all my reviews

If you folks at all enjoy what you read here, and have an interest in gardening, or don't enjoy what you read here, but still have an interest in gardening, then take a look at my new blog, The Insufficient Self-Sufficient. Obviously, there isn't much there to be read, yet. But my hope is to post weekly updates on the states of the roughly 1,000 square feet of my life devoted to growing things.

This something of a procrastination post. I have far more important things to be doing. Yet here we are. I love gardening. That is not to say that I am a gifted, skilled, or even particularly competent gardener. I just enjoy it. As I took a walk around my neighborhood this evening with my pipe stuffed with some Old Shenandoah tobacco, and eventually wound up back in my yard, I had a few rambling thoughts about this activity, at least as it exists in my life. Gardening is far from cost effective. Every time I endeavor to start a garden, my rationale is that I will be saving my family all sorts of money in the long run. Sure, I have spent forty plus dollars in seed and at least that again in topsoil, compost, and potting soil, but surely there will be a payoff, right? Then I realize that I have planted the sorts of things we tend to eat...cabbage, spinach, lettuce, zucchini. Do you have idea how much produce of that nature you can buy for eighty dollars? A lot. But homegrown things...