normanack

Gardening is my biggest passion. Well, other than reading. I do like to craft, as well: sewing, quilting, knitting, and crocheting take most of my crafting time.

Years ago my husband-to-be and I scratched out a garden on the edges of a city lot. It kept us sane. We gardened in a succession of rentals. On one memorable occasion, the other tenants buried their cat in tiny vegetable patch, believing it would be good fertilizer. Blurgh.

We graduated to a typical surburban house where we were the only organic yardkeepers out of 107 households. It was a tough battle, and people thought we were nuts for not having our trees professionally misted with malathion and not putting pounds of pesticides and herbicides on our lawn. In order to keep up with the Joneses, I hand-pulled every bit of crabgrass from our 1/2-acre lawn. (Yes, I was insane.)

Now we live in a lovely rural area where no one gives a damn what you do. One of our neighbors routinely burns all his trash, including a fiberglass boat and an old mattress, in his yard. You can get some mighty odd odors when you burn weird stuff.

Our lawn is way, way too large to be environmentally responsible, but at least we don’t put any chemicals on it. We inherited many lovely gardens on the property from the previous owners, for which I am very thankful. I’m not particularly fond of the ivy and vinca, nor of the riverstone mulch, but the tree peonies, fritillaria, and toadflax make up for it.

This year we’ve finally established a vegetable patch, which I’ll be folioing here. I’m super-excited, even though I didn’t start early enough to have fun mail-ordering way too many wacky seed varieties and had instead to rely on local stores. (Can you say Burpee’s Hybrid?)