Barbara Kingsolver = My Heroine

Okay, so, per my post below, I'm writing a post about 'how Barbara Kingsolver is my new heroine', and I'm combining it with 'our new wine crate garden'. The previous post about our dinner can be read as on offshoot of this post as well.

Have you read the book Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver? If you haven't, you should. That book has literally inspired me to change the way I live my life in regards to food and food making and food buying habits. She has the perfect blend of wry humor and wit and intelligence and plain old FACTS, and vignettes of different facets of her experiment for her family of four to eat only local food for an entire year. While reading that book, I wanted to dig my fingers into the soil and plant and harvest things, and I wanted to cook and eat and can lots of fruits and vegetables, and I wanted to own chickens, and make cheese, and stop eating animals that not only spent their lives crammed together, but who also had lower levels of important vitamins and other nutrients, and whose eggs had higher levels of the bad kind of cholesterol than their pasture fed cage free counterparts. (Make no mistake, I have no intention of ever becoming vegetarian voluntarily.)

Long before I was finished reading the book, Peter and I had decided it would be extraordinarily clever of us to find some wooden wine crates for free from a wine or liquor store to use as square foot gardening boxes. So we did. And you know what? It really was extraordinarily clever of us! It's working like a charm! We have no dirt of our own, and no sunlight in our back patio, pretty much ever, so, on our front porch we currently have 7 wooden wine crates filled with little growing plants, with plans to find 5 or 6 more. In these boxes, we have squash, peas, spinach, lima beans, and lettuce, accompanied by a couple of potted strawberry plants.

A little over a week ago, we were notified that a garden plot was waiting for us that we had been on a waiting list for. So for the last week we've been going over to our garden weeding, turning the soil, transplanting the thinned out plants from our wine crates (it's worth a try, right?) and some other plants, and finally, today, planting new seeds! We transplanted a potted tomato plant and strawberry plant, and several squash plants. And today we planted: green onions, yellow onions, serrano peppers, jalapeno peppers, tomatoes, corn, zucchini, cantaloupe, honeydew and one other kind of melon, spinach, and basil!

I have to tell you, the satisfaction I feel from seeing little plants poke out of the ground from tiny seeds we planted and watered is pretty profound. I am profoundly satisfied with my gardens! And hopefully, if we have thumbs anywhere near the color green, we'll be eating our own organically homegrown vegetables in our meals, right around the time our Two Small Farms first 9 week period is over.

Now we can sit back and wait for the fruits of our labor, and while we're waiting, we'll munch on a little bit of that homemade cheese.

Ahhhhhh.