Growing a Garden

With 20-degree weather in northern Illinois, it's difficult to think about the growing season and summer coming. But, before we know it, warmer weather will be upon us. Especially now that our USDA growing zone has been bumped up to a warmer level (Zone 6), in what I love to hear described as not global warming, but global wierding.

Since most of the major renovation projects are out of the way at Humphrey House, and we don't have much money to spend right now anyway, I'm trying something new this summer: planting a vegetable garden. Jen has grown several herbs and peppers each year in our backyard. And we're slowly getting pretty decent at this. Last year our plants were quite successful.

So for 2009, I figured it was time to leap into a full-fledged grow-your-own-food garden this year. Sort of a victory garden for self-sufficiency. After all, you can't get more local then your backyard! We're beginning by starting to grow plants from seeds ourselves. To make things easy, I picked up a seed starting kit made by a company with the deceptive and tempting name, "Jiffy". I'm hopeful that it really is *that* easy to start seeds, and the hardest part is thinking far enough in advance. We will see.

So with the help of a Mother Earth guide to growing your own food, I've started some seeds for a garden that hopefully isn't too ambitious for us:

Current seeds:
Broccoli
Onions
Eggplant
Thyme

To be joined later by:
Carrots
Tomatoes
Basil
Peppers
And maybe even some sweetcorn growing along the garage!

Coming next: Time to find and start planning space in the backyard to grow this garden!