Czarina reminds us this morning that it is National Gardening Day.

This video is an old one, published during the pandemic, but it has some good information.

One of my favorite YouTube channels. It’s Spring, and time to think about growing a garden. You’re home right? If you are able and have time, growing food is good for you and your family. You can grow something almost anywhere.

You may be thinking about planting a garden for the first time. Or you might be thinking of expanding your garden space in response to the rise in food prices.

I set up my small greenhouse in my living room yesterday. I will use it for seed starting. It’s mostly to control light and humidity, but also to keep the cat out of the plants! It’s a bit late, but not too much and, as Jess has often said, if you don’t plant those seeds, it is for sure that you won’t get any plants!

Whatever way that you garden, even if it is just flowers in a basket on your front porch or patio, it seems there is an inborn need to see things growing. I will grow herbs, and probably tomatoes and peppers. I will also be starting some lettuce and spring onions outside on the patio in grow bags. They will live even if we get a bit of frost. My dwarf tomatoes and herbs will (eventually) be growing in my Green Stalk.

When my daughter and her cousin were little (5 or 6?) my mom had them plant little pine trees. That was in the early 1970’s. About ten years ago we all visited the farm (which is now owned by a friend), and the ‘kids’ got to see their huge, beautiful, trees!

Gardening with your children and grandchildren is a great thing to do. These days, my daughter and her husband have as large a garden as they can on their small city lot. They grow tomatoes, peppers, broccoli and whatever takes their fancy that year, as well as a variety of herbs. Their two boys have helped them garden since they were little, and so it continues …

My daughter was on the board of their town’s farmer’s market, and still participates there every Saturday during the summer. Her younger son helps out sometimes too.

If you think you are too old to garden, I’ll just say that my mom was putting in a big garden into her eighties. The local farmer prepared the ground for her, but the rest she did herself. She paid the kids to kill tomato worms and help with the weeding.

Mom loved gardening. As the neighbor boy at the farm, Curtie, wrote about her,

Jessie always gave me a tour of the garden, site of the old barnyard, the reason for the ease at which things grew, I was told. It was here where Jessie’s enthusiasm for the simple things in life made an impression on me. It was early July, the second season for some new strawberry plants from Kraft’s Greenhouse. As we walked down the row, Jessie exclaimed, “Oooh Curtie, look! A berry!” And at that moment it seemed that I had caught the contagious joy of the first berry of the season. That thought has always remained in my mind, and I retrieve it often. It reminds me that the important things in life are the simple things, and it reminds me of my friend, Jessie.

I remember well when she (age 70) and my aunt Anna (age 81) were putting up quarts and quarts of tomatoes and chili sauce and pickles! My mom always grew beets and made pickles from them just for me. Mom’s birthday was this week, born on April 10, 1906.

In 2019 I posted a similar gardening video, and got so many great comments. I reread them today. Czar left some, and it was so nice to ‘hear’ from him again! If you want to read them yourself, I posted it on March 13, 2019.

My Journey Into Gardening & Why I Garden (A Response of Sorts to MIGardener)