Posts Tagged ‘gardening’

This week, I wanted to dive into the world of urban homesteading blogs.  What does it take to run a successful one?  How do you get started?  What are the key lessons?  For insight, I turned to Erica Strauss.  Erica blogs about urban homesteading, gardening, and keeping a productive home at Northwest Edible Life.  Before focusing her efforts on her homestead, she owned a successful personal chef and catering business.  Now she nurtures vegetables, fruit and two beautiful children on one-third of an acre in suburban Seattle.  I’ve been reading Erica’s blog for a while now, and she was kind enough to share some of her insight with GitC readers. 1. Your blog, Northwest Edible Life, focuses on your homesteading adventures. Tell me, how did you get involved in urban homesteading? Urban Homesteading for me is really a gardening hobby that’s gotten way out of hand. I started growing veggies

This year I decided to branch out into strawberries.  I purchased the smallest order possible (25 plants), which arrived today.  I must admit, I was not expecting the dry, dusty roots that arrived, but I guess this is how they ship!  In to the strawberry pots they went – I’ll be feeding them with the rich compost from my Worm Factory and hopefully they’ll produce some good fruit in Summer 2012. 

Grown in the City turns one next week!  25o+ posts, 15+ videos, 5+ interviews, and 5+ ”How To”‘s later, it’s time to celebrate! All next week, I’ll be doing Grown in the City Giveaways – one per day, starting on Monday 3/7 and ending with the big giveaway on Friday, March 11 (my own birthday, and the first anniversary of the blog). How do you enter?  Each day I will post an open-ended ”Question of the day.”  Simply leave a comment in response (with your email in the email field).  Each day I’ll pick a comment (either my favorite, or a random – I’ll make that clear in the post) and email the winner to send them their swag. Sounds good, huh?  How do you make sure you don’t miss out?  Add us to your google reader!

This weekend I had the distinct pleasure of passing on my love of gardening to the next generation – my three year old neice in Tucson.  Before leaving, I searched the book store for the perfect gift to share with her.  I knew I wanted to get her something to do with gardening and food, but there’s not much out there for the 3-4 year old set.  I settled on the Klutz book, Good Growing: A Kid’s Guide to Green Gardening.  The book is definitely a bit too adult for 3-4 year olds, but the good part is that it comes with a kid-friendly seed starting kit.  We flipped through the book and looked at all the pictures, and I explained how food comes from the tiny seeds that were included with the kit.  “That’s really cool!” she said.  I was watching a gardener born before my eyes! We decided

Welcome to our newest guest blogger, Rosemary Markowski, who will be covering farms in the DC region throughout the next several weeks. Rosemary is a mother, painter, and sculptor who writes about her experience as a working artist and her transition from urban homesteading to life on the farm. She will be exploring the relationship between our city and its local food sources. Rosemary lives in Bluemont, Virginia with her husband, three children and menagerie. View work at www.rosemarymarkowski.com and read more at mistakenforarebel.blogspot.com. Why are you interested in food grown in the city? If you are like many of today’s urban dwellers you are concerned with knowing where your food is coming from. With many health and safety concerns surrounding food, the fewer steps it takes to your plate the better. Food that is fresh looks better, tastes better, and is better for you. After all it was Julia

As loyal readers know, I am a huge fan of youth gardening and school gardens.  I think there are incredible teaching moments in the garden, and I’m really glad my parents encouraged us to garden when we were young.  In the past, I’ve covered the Sustainable School Yard in New Orleans, and the Donaldson, Louisiana Freedom Garden, so I was excited to go to the “Success Stories from School Gardens” panel at Rooting DC. The Saturday afternoon session was moderated by Sean Miller, Earth Day Network, with panelists including Lola Bloom & Rebecca Lemos from City Blossoms; Kaitfa Anderson-Hall from Washington Youth Garden; Barbara Percival fromWatkins Elementary School; and Rebecca Helgerson from Harriet Tubman Elementary School.  I’ve posted about nine minutes of the session on my Youtube site, but some of the key takeaways from the panel were: Be realistic about your success.  It may be getting one child to enjoy urban gardening, or

Twitter is an interesting animal.  It’s been fantastic for finding news stories, keeping up on what the latest movements and trends are (#DumptheDervaeses, anyone?) and for “meeting” a lot of interesting people.  When I first joined Twitter, and was extremely overwhelmed, I tweeted, ”Twitter. Millions of voices, shouting in the wilderness.”  I still feel largely the same – even though now I realize that we’re all just waiting for an echo. In undergrad, I wrote my Honors thesis on the impact of instant communication on college students.  It won an award and was archived at the Villanova University library if you wanted to read it, but unfortunately, it’s sorely outdated!  Back then I could have never imagined how Facebook and Twitter would revolutionize everything – I was dealing mostly with email and AOL Instant Messenger (remeber that?).  Hard to believe how quickly technology has advanced. Why the long diatribe about Twitter and instant communication?  I