Why another garden blog?
It’s our contention that individual and family food gardens, however small, can provide many important benefits including saving money, improving our health, and helping protect the health of our planet. There are dozens of really good garden blogs out there, some of which we’ll be mentioning as we develop this one. Many of the better ones, though, aren’t directly geared to specifics of our region (the northern Great Lakes area) or our primary focus: learning and helping others learn to grow healthy food on a small scale, as in school, community, and home gardens. We invite you to learn with us, to contribute and share relevant experiences, and to suggest improvements to this fledgling effort. Please see the ABOUT page to find out what we're...all ABOUT.
School and Other Gardens
In our GARDEN UPDATES page, we'll introduce some school gardens and talk briefly about a couple community garden programs. Following the progress of these gardens through the year will be an exciting undertaking. We share the firm belief, shared vividly by Trina Ball in our ABOUT page, that gardening can be a wonderfully enriching experience for children, one whose importance for the future should not be underestimated. In our EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES page, we'll mention at least one way you might join us in helping others share the benefits food gardening can bring.
Gardening Season
There’s no such thing as “gardening season”; all seasons are that! Over the course of the next year, we’ll take you through some of our experiences as home gardeners and Master Gardener Volunteers in a climate of The North that offers its challenges, but also its great rewards. Earlier this week (on the last day of March), I harvested some of my best-ever beets and carrots, fresh from the garden. Protected by nothing but some straw and our winter-long lake effect snow, they lay mostly undisturbed, holding their crispness and even increasing their autumn sweetness. A marvelous treat!
Getting Started
This time of year, though, is the beginning of a new cycle of life for most of our annual vegetables grown in home, school, and community gardens. For many types of plants, indoor seed starting begins the process. Why start your own seeds when soon stores will be well-stocked with plants? You can grow better, healthier plants, and ones better suited to your needs. You’ll have a much wider selection from which to choose. You can time their growth to have them ready just as weather conditions allow them to move outdoors. You can start at different times, extending your harvests over longer intervals. And even considering some initial investments, you can save money in the long run.
Most plants tend to be quite forgiving of the mistakes gardeners make; I know…I’ve eaten many a juicy tomato plucked off a badly mistreated plant. Plants are quite determined to survive and reproduce. There are, though, quite a few things we can do to help them along. For one thing, it’s useful to know something about their heritage, and to do what we can to make them feel “at home”—to approximate if we can the natural conditions in which they evolved. Further, over just a few generations, plants tend to adapt to differing conditions. That’s why I try to purchase seed grown at a latitude close to my own, in my case the 45th parallel, and if I can, to save seed of my own, which I hope will adapt further. I am NOT an expert seed saver; for that, I defer to my fellow contributor, Mike Kiessel, whose knowledge is astonishing. Mike told me recently that he now has 160 varieties of saved heirloom tomato seed in his inventory.
This past winter, I spent many a hopeful hour perusing garden seed catalogs and ordered just over 100 varieties from four companies I have learned to trust. I try to order from co-ops and family-owned companies if possible, and always from Seed Savers Exchange.
There are many variants among seed starting METHODS & MATERIALS, some of which are described on that page. Here’s some of what I have growing so far this year:
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| Red Russian Kale, Day 10 |
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| De Cicco Broccoli, Day 12 |
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Top to Bottom: King Richard and Blue Solaise Leeks, Day 20; and Sage, Day 10
Have questions about gardening? Send them along to one of our contributors, and we'll try our best to address them in our Q&A CORNER. If we don't know the answers, we'll say so, but together our team has lots of experience and familiarity with the challenges of the Northern Gardener. And, as always, we'll recommend that for reliable advice on a multitude of subjects, you should consider contacting your local University Extension office. In our state, Michigan, we're proud of our Michigan State University Extension system; see http://msue.anr.msu.edu/.
Finally, any trip to a library or book store, online or otherwise, can reveal a bewildering number of books and periodicals on gardening. Many are wonderfully inspiring and excellent sources of information; and some are...fluff. In our FURTHER READING page, we'll talk briefly about some of the best, and point out some useful online updates as we see them.
Happy Gardening!
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Suttons Bay
Schools, Northport Public School, Leland Public School, and Leelanau Children’s
Center in Leelanau County at both the Northport and Leland locations;
Platte River Elementary in partnership with Grow Benzie in Benzie County; Central
Lake Public School in partnership with ISLAND and
USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service in Antrim County; and Interlochen
Elementary School, Traverse Heights Elementary School, Central Grade School, The
Greenspire School, and the Children’s Garden at the Traverse Area District
Library in Grand Traverse County all participated. Thanks to the enthusiastic efforts of all participants, school garden programs significantly expanded and flourished during the year; the outlook for 2014 is more promising than ever! 
