I enjoy reading Jamie Oliver's blogs and books. I recently grabbed one of his magazines from my girlfriends parents house in California. The magazine is called Jamie.
Reading through Jamie I found an interesting excerpt "make your garden feed you". I will try my damnedest to live by that rule.
Gardening has always intrigued me, although I really didn't like helping my mother in her garden when I was a younger, mostly because I wanted to play with my toys and was a bit lazy.
However, even then whenever I did help, I found something calming and rewarding about it. Granted we ate a lot of zucchini and beans, I understood that there was this special thing about the food on my plate, it came from our garden.
My girlfriend and I moved into a cozy place in Somerville, MA. We totally lucked out with this place. We have an amazing back yard, that at before moving in, was pretty much a dirt playground. However we saw the potential and were extremely excited about making the yard our next project. It no longer is paved by dirt, but by a fresh bed of grass grown from seed, that takes patience.
Some would call us domesticated, I call it blinded by passion. I love to do so many things, and Gardening just happens to be one of them. Anyways, I'm not writing to defend myself, I am simply writing to talk about our home garden.
I'm the kind of person that tends to simply dive into things. Granted, I do like to have an idea of what I'm getting ready to do, and may research here and there. But when it comes down to it, I just go for it and see what comes of it.
It all started with Herbs.
I love herbs! Basil in particular is one of my favorite herbs, I have a basil plant, and eat the leaves right off the plant.
I had some seeds that my father gave me about 2 years ago. He told me, "you just put a little dirt in a pot and put the seeds on the dirt" (this was in Italian). I took his advice and tossed some seeds into dirt, okay, I had these little pods that I purchased from Home Depot, but I think it wouldn't have mattered. The seeds grew, it was so amazing.
I purchased a bigger pot, and planted all my seedlings into it. I have more basil than what I know what to do with and I am happy about it.
Rosemary was next, I purchased a seedling plant and it's still growing. I also had some fennel and Cilantro. Also have Parsley and some purple Basil (thanks to my lovely girlfriend), and they are still growing strong. Thyme, thyme such a wonderful herb, growing a bunch of that too.
I use all these herbs regularly, even if it's tossing them in a sandwich or salad, I even tried it with some Strawberries and Cabernet Sauvignon vinegar.
From there, I thought it would be nice to have some Tomatoes. I really enjoy sweet cherry tomatoes, they make a wonderful sauce and are by far one of my favorite types of tomatoes. Needless to say, they were extremely fun and simple to grow. I only planted two tomato plants, to see how strong they grow, next year I will have 12!
My girlfriend and I are with the fact that we are growing food in our back yard. I would say the idea of "make your garden feed you" was definitely in the back of our minds, but it hadn't quite hit us until we had our first red pepper from the garden.
Vegetables
We were ready to grow vegetables, but hadn't quite decided on what. We were at the store one day and happened to run across some pepper seedling plants and decided, yes peppers. Then we grabbed some "Fairy tale" eggplants and Italian peppers. Why? because we wanted to.
It was time to plant our vegetables, gardening is a load of work! It took a full day to saw and hammer the wood for the gardening bed. We layed down an anti-weed cover and filled the bed with some organic dirt.
It has been a few weeks since we started the garden and our vegetables are finally beginning to ripen, which is good since fall is right around the corner.
So today, I "harvested" two Italian red Peppers, one Eggplant and one purple Pepper along with some purple basil. I'm thinking curried vegetables for dinner tomorrow night.
This is just the beginning, and I'm really looking forward to it.
Thank you garden, you are all too simple and wonderful.
Happy eating.
Antonio
