Beginning a Blog and Starting a Garden

February 22, 2010


Why start a blog? But I didn’t really think about it until last Monday afternoon when I was starting a new garden journal for 2010. I had just finished planting 108 individual containers of tomatoes, tomatillios, peppers, and egg plants. (To be more specific I planted four different varieties of tomatoes Roma VF which I will use to make sauce for next year. Brandywine-a large heirloom eating tomato, Siberian-an earlier mid sized eating tomato and Isis Cherry-a cherry tomato. I also planted three different varieties of peppers-.California wonder, a carnival mix, and an Italian sweet pepper called the Godfather! I also started several flats of egg plant seeds-in hopes that after two years of wet and soggy weather, we will have a warm, dry summer with just the right amount of rain. Anyway, every year, I start seeds around Presidents day, stick them on heat mats until they germinate and then transplant them at least three times into increasingly larger containers and place under fluorescent lights before they go into the garden on Memorial Day. It is a long, loving, and messy process that helps us survive the rest of winter and turns our dining room and kitchen into a temporary greenhouse. Back to the blog…the idea came to me as I was writing. Every year, I buy a cheap notebook from the local dollar store and write down plans for the year’s garden. I write one page, and then drag the book out to the garden in April or May and make sketches of our raised beds and plan for what will go into each bed. I do this in some way every year but that’s as far as the journal gets. I have tried keeping a journal on the computer-have two entries from 2006 “Weather wet and cold”. “Asparagus roots and other seeds arrived today.” So keeping an online journal in the form of a blog seems like a great idea. I love to garden more than anything and I love to share my knowledge and experience about gardening. Ask anyone who lives and gardens/farms in Southeastern Massachusetts and they will tell you about the climate and how easily we grow a lovely crop of rocks of all shapes and sizes. They magically appear and reappear each year -even in the course of a week or two. They have formed many a stone wall-more about that later. Those of us who are blessed to live in this area-(yes it can be lovely- wonderful sea breezes, tremendous storms, and gorgeous foliage) often stand in the middle of our gardens shaking our fist at the cold and rainy June skies which will surely cause our newly forming tomatoes to develop blossom rot or a fungus or conversely complaining about the heat and humidity! But no matter the weather, we love our gardens and farms. My plan for this blog is to keep it going until the middle or end of October-give or take a month or so. This is when my gardening season really ends-until the week after Christmas and the beginning of January when seed catalogues begin to arrive in the mail and then the entire process begins once again! Here’s to dreaming of warm and sunny June days and to red, ripe tomatoes and peppers in July and August! Happy dreaming- MG