Ready, set, grow!

This morning I made my way over to the annual Oakhurst Community Garden Plant Sale with my friends Nicole and Jason. (I am kicking myself for not taking any pictures while I was there! Anyways, here's some shots from their website of what it looks like. Just pretend you can see us in there... I'll get better about taking my camera along with me...). Jason and Nicole got a lovely, restrained selection of vegetables, herbs, and flowers for the pots on their deck. I on the other hand went a little overboard with excitement.

My load for the morning included romaine lettuce, butter lettuce, chard, cilantro, lemon thyme, parsley, basil, pickling cucumbers, beefsteak tomatoes, rainbow cherry tomatoes, San Marzano tomatoes, calliope eggplant, bell peppers, zucchini, and summer squash.

While it does seem like a lot, I feel like this is probably a realistic amount to start with. The herbs I will do in pots that can stay on the porch with easy range of the kitchen, and the rest will go in the raised bed that my mom's boyfriend, Mike, my gentlemen, Matt, and I will all build tomorrow. I am heading to Home Depot after work to pick up materials, and then over to Gardenhood for all of the soil, compost, and mulch I will need for the bed.

The weather this weekend is perfect out and it is honestly killing me that I am stuck in the gallery at work today and am not outside working on my garden. Soon!

A few words on fate and chickens

I certainly am someone that believes that idea of making your own luck and am not totally one for predestination. But, sometimes, it is hard to ignore the fact that certain things have a way of coming into your life where pieces fall seamlessly into place like it was always meant to be.

I can only chuckle at the now aptly named title of this blog, as its near future will most certainly be shifting to more of a focus on my attempts at self-sustainability in the form of gardening, chickens (near future, please!), and the can of worms diving into those interests produce. I hopefully will indeed be cultivating my garden soon enough.

So, how is this fate? In the last month I have been doing a good amount of research and digging into the world of vegetable gardening. While my house is a mere 600 square feet, the back yard is significantly larger. While I have always had a bit of bad luck with growing things, I was suddenly overcome with a potentially insane, but optimistic nonetheless, desire to create a vegetable garden of my very own.

The first thing I did was to finally get on the Animal, Vegetable, Miracle train about two years late. I was sold. Now, any ideas that have previously been shoved off as impractical have come to a head. As I finished the last page of the book, hell as I finished the third chapter of the book, I felt like I had been given a dictate. Then, this afternoon I received an email announcing that I had won a contest for books on canning and chicken raising! It is meant to be.

So, from now on the blog will be shifting more in this direction as I begin to try my luck once more with growing a green thumb.


For more writing on Atlanta's arts community go to my other website, BurnAway.