Tom, I love your articles, and the guest article was also very good regarding kitchen gardens. However, there's one important component missing: not everyone owns (or even rents) houses with yards. In fact, quite a few of us, myself included, live in apartments.

So maybe the key to home veg production is not only kitchen gardens, but also community, urban, and rooftop gardens. Because it's hard to grow veggies like squash or carrots in a pot on your balcony, even if it gets plenty of sun like mine.

And how about putting gardening in the science curricula of middle school and high school students? And I don't mean growing bean plants in a styrofoam cup. Gardening should be a life skill, like driving and balancing a checkbook.

Just a thought.

B.D. issued the ultimate challenge to the post-consumer gardener, one I have been trying to meet ever since. I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like, "You know, once you own good tools and understand something about seed saving, you can actually garden year after year without spending anything at all."
She's my favorite crunchy role model. Above challenge was issued in 2004 or 2005, I think. I don't think she really meant for people to go all radical non-consumerist, just chill out on the unnecessary garden-related gadgets, but it really made an impression on me.

When I was a boy growing up in Ohio, my now 91 year old Grandmother put us to work. When I finished the mowing and trimming of her yard, I energetically joined her in the hoeing, spading, turning of soil, planting of seeds and harvesting associated with a city lot sized garden.  It was a joy to eat a pasta dinner with sauce made by hand, grown by hand, right outside the door of her house.

Now I live with my wife in Oregon and we've taken it a step further to include hydroponics grown outside, rooftop gardens (deer and racoons are rampant) and our own indoor germinating system complete with energy star rated T8 growing lamps purchased from our local organic growers supply.  Our seeds are increasingly heirloom (read Seeds of Change) and we've also got a small vermiculture project going on to speed up our compost and soil rejuvenation.

All I can say is we're hooked, and we try to hook as many other people as possible.  It's one great way to save money, and the quality and taste are so much better than even the organic stuff we buy at the markets.  I wholly recommend that we shoot for 50% reduction in long distance food, just like we're shooting for 50% reductions in carbon. How else will we achieve these numbers ?

As for me and mine, don't be surprised to see us hauling garden supplies, on our bikes, of course ! - JD & Kelley Howell, Eugene, OR

JD & Kelley Howell of Eugene, OR visit us: Cut20.blogspot.com

This is a subject so very near and dear to my heart. I've been growing my own veggies for years and would love to see more people do so. It strikes me that in the suburbs, we are already a nation of farmers: We slavishly farm - grass. Stupid, useless plant that requires water, fertilizer, pesticides and weekly passes with a gas-guzzling mower. If only we could get more people to replace some portion of their lawns with veggies, how good it would be for the planet and, not incidentally, for our own health!

I love SnoDragon's idea, to make gardening an important part of the curriculum in high schools and colleges.  Especially at an urban campus such as my alma mater, Columbia, I suspect doing gardening as one's science requirement would be hugely popular.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

KMP
Go vertical with the cucumbers.  I started growing them more than 15 years ago, and I have always used a trellis or two or three of some sort.  Nothing fancy, just somethings I put together from scavanged material, ornamental metal wire fencing stapled/nailed to a scrap lumber frame 5-6 feet tall.  For a few years, my sister used a simple string net hanging from a privacy fence.  I like mine to be free standing so I can get around behind.  Makes for easy pickings.  You have to pay attention to the vines when they are young to get them to start climbing.  I also move them as they are growing to get them to spread out.  Kind of an art form.
A warning that probably doesn't apply to you:  One year I helped a friend trellis her cucumbers.  One morning after the vines has just reached the top of the 6-foot trellis, she looked out to see the top three feet gone.  During the night, deer ate the vines thru the back of the trellis.  A wire-mesh fence around the garden kept them from getting the lower three feet.  
One of the simple pleasures I get from gardening is the aroma of fresh green bell peppers.  A few of them sitting in the kitchen will shortly fill the room with their aroma.  
Oh, yeah.  When growing peppers, don't grow habanero.  One small plant produces 20-40 little yellow peppers, and you got to wear gloves to work with them.  I didn't and my hands tingled for two days.

at a remove

Ataremove, thanks for the advice on the cukes.  I'm planning on some sort of inventive, backyard-tree-branch sort of staking, if I can make it strong enough.  If not I suppose a trip to the hardware store will be warranted.  This is assuming that I can get them to grow more than a couple of inches, which will be success in and of itself. White-tailed deer are rampant here (although my pansies have lasted 3 whole days now, hurrah!) so I'm hoping they won't actually come up onto the deck - I think the sound of their hooves on the wooden planking startles them, as I've heard them take one or two steps up before and then bound away.

A couple of my tomato  plants are indeterminate, so they will definitely need staking as well.  A year of experimenting in my "garden" I guess!

My 4 year-old friend Kami loves any vegetable that is a "surprise;" potatoes, root veggies, carrots, etc., with their leafy green tops and surprising gem of a veggie under the dirt, thrill her more than words.  She also seems fascinated by all the different varieties of leafy & salad greens, but passed by the herbs in the Stone Barns greenhouse with nary a glance.  Veggies that flower seem to be an obvious choice for kids and the whole germination process is pretty much a miracle - what kid could not be excited by boring old dirt suddenly sprouting into green life?

Perversely, the September-to-June school year seems to have been designed, historically, with the sense that the school kids will have to be available to help their families when stuff is growing on their families' farms.

So, with respect to the seasons, and the way plants respond to them, it makes no sense to do a gardening course, beginning in September and ending in December; and another one, beginning in January and ending in May.

Or, given lab opportunities nowadays, could the seasons be altered, somehow?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Pangolin,
Gaia, the Earth, the original female principle, is not easy to fathom.

She came to hate her male mate Ouranos, who kvetched that she was constantly bearing him horrible monsters, such as one-eyed Cyclopes and hundred-armed Giants.  And yet, he lay on top of her, and was constantly impregnating her; they could not help it.

In pain and misery, she asked her children to deliver her from him.  Only one of her many sons and daughters, the Titan Kronos, listened to his mother, over against his father, and obeyed her.

He took a great sickle, and lopped off the genitals of his father Ouranos.  Ouranos in great pain moved heavenward, and never again impregnated Gaia.  (Nor presumably did he impregnate anybody ever after; he could not; plus, he now had a terrificly bad genital memory.)  The genitals descended into the Mediterranean Sea, and became the island of Cyprus.  The blood-mixed-with-sperm-straight-from-the-testicles floated in the Mediterranean Sea, near the western shore of Cyprus, and in due course gave rise, amidst light foam and sweet attendant gods and goddesses, to the goddess Aphrodite, as depicted in the famous quattrocento painting by Sandro Botticelli of the "Birth of Venus," aka Aphrodite.

You might think that Gaia wanted to favor Kronos with great favor subsequently.  In fact, she shared with him only a limited prophecy, that a child of his would overthrow him.  So, every child that his sister/wife Rhea bore, he swallowed at once, alive: Hera (pop!), Demeter (pop!), Hestia (pop!), Poseidon (pop!), and Hades (pop! - yuck!).

Last of all to be born was Zeus, whom Rhea figured (duh!, brilliant lady!) she had to hide.  So, she wrapped a great boulder in baby clothes and presented it to Kronos as his new-born son (pop! - ugh!).  Then, she hid baby Zeus in a cave on the island of Crete.

When he grew up, he pretended he was a physician, and went to attend his father Kronos, who was complaining of a monstrous belly ache.  So, she gave him an emetic to make him throw up all his children -- being immortal gods, they were alive and full-grown -- : Hera, Demeter, Hestia, Poseidon, and Hades; and the boulder, which landed on the spot that is now Delphi, the most sacred oracle of Gaia in the world, called the Omphalos, the Navel.

With his brothers and sisters at his side, as well as his disrespected aunts and uncles, Zeus went on to overthrow Papa Kronos.

But Gaia maintained an oracle at Delphi, where the Omphalos landed.  Later, her great-grandson Apollo, son of Zeus, took charge of it; but she was always the principle of wisdom there.

The thing is, if you ask Gaia a question, she will always give some sort of answer; but the answer is rarely straight-forward.  Dealing with her answer is about as difficult as never having asked her in the first place.

Unless of course, dear Pangolin, you are the stuff of heroes, such as I have no doubt you are.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Yes, I am sure you are a regular Orlando Bloom.

Give me Kevin Costner any day.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Nous ne sommes pas du tout en Angleterre, nous sommes en France!  La belle France!

Do you know "The Three Musketeers," of 1973?  The late Oliver Reed as Athos?  The older warrior holding up against the young whipper-snappers, nay!, overcoming them?  Tre'sor!

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

That tomato sandwich (post way back) sounds awesome! Finally spring is here and I believe the final few inches of snow in the garden will melt this week. Yeah! It's been a long, hard winter here in Maine. But right behind me as I type, seedlings are growing - tomatoes, many kinds, too many really, celery, basil, oregano (which doesn't come back in my garden, more basil, stevia (which I treat as an annual), and various flowers. Soon I'll plant the brassicas and then I'll start some nasturtiums because one can never have them soon enough. And the birds have returned along with the sun and warmth. Such a blessing, at last. Yes, growing a garden, wherever it may be - in pots, in the yard, on the roof, is a wonderful thing. No one mentioned beans. Beans are great for kids, or anyone, to grow. And you can freeze, pickle (dilly beans) or can them (which I prefer over freezing) whatever you can't eat. And garlic - don't forget garlic (which we plant in the fall here in Maine).

"Maine" is a French placename, but I do not know if French Protestants ever had a hand in settling it -- or in settling any part of Quebec or Acadie.  To judge from the names of towns on the right bank of the Saint Lawrence, it looks like the French back then in the 17th century were as bad as the Spanish (?!), unable to found anything without naming it after one saint or another.  And the impressive Catholic churches of the "Acadian Coast" of Nova Scotia are among that province's sightseeing destinations.

But in fact I do not remember Huguenots in "The Three Musketeers."  However, the subject came up in a sexy and evil episode in the sequel, "The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge."  Faye Dunaway, as Milady de Winter, finds herself in an English prison, guarded by a sensitive young Puritan; she wins his sympathy by telling him that she is a persecuted Huguenot -- which is a lie, however -- ; when he sits with her in her cell to do Bible study, she seduces him, and murders him, and takes his keys, and escapes.

SMLowry,
congratulations on the good start our garden is having!  Back in the 1970s, when I spent the summer with my grandparents on the New Jersey seashore (and worked as a projectionist, showing such movies as "The Three Musketeers" and its sequel), I vaguely remember that the only brassica that my grandfather planted was broccoli; possibly there was cauliflower and kale and cabbage, but I am not sure.

But he always planted beans.  His favorite variety was pole beans, which were rather spectacular, because they required an elaborate system of sticks and strings.

I would like to be able to ask him how he went about planning the garden every year, moving the vegetables around so that the soil would not be depleted.  Usually whatever he did worked; but every now and again one of his vegetables came in feebly.  I think the cucumbers might have been the most delicate in that regard.

There was a loose cat in the neighborhood, whom he hated with a great passion (well, he was a Scorpio, after all, and Scorpios rarely do anything less than passionately), because the cat would enter the garden sneakily and poop there.  It seemed to find the prepared soil of the garden a nice place to dig and bury its poop.  I do not think that would have been bad for the plants, actually; but yes, it would have made my grandfather's job a bit messier.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

The fertilizer companies are reaping almost as large of a profit as the oil companies. The new demand for corn has placed a high demand on fertilizer.

Fertilizer company stocks reflect the recent increase in demand. We need however to grow organic. In Eastern Ky. I know of gardens that have been tended for over 120 years and the soil is rich and black and productive. The mules and cows and chickens produce the fertilizer needed to keep the soil tip top and not burn it up.

A chicken house used to be the most effective for a compost heap. The straw and vegatible matter that was placed under the chicken house to catch the droppings went right into the mix. You got the added advantage of fresh eggs and in this post out of respect for those of us who don't eat animals. You know what else you got...

The price of feed even for county folk who have the room and no zoning laws has put a crimp on the family garden.

I loved the post about children working in the garden during summer vacation, yea right, like all of us that had that program made available to them in past generations rejoiced in that prospect.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.