If you think that I'm developing my mini-farm because I like to eat good food, then you would be correct. I love fresh food. Who doesn't?
Of course I'm excited to get things growing, so it's hard to wait until my entire plot is dug up. Last week, I looked up
Sunset magazine's
Northwest Checklist February and saw that it's time to set out bare-root asparagus crowns and start sweet pea seeds indoors. I especially love the taste of asparagus and smell of sweet peas, so down to the
garden center I went, and home I came with a package of six
USDA organic Jersey Knight asparagus crowns from
Van Bloem Gardens and a
royal family mixture of sweet pea seeds from
Ed Hume Seeds. Ed's been a gardening guru around the Pacific Northwest for ages, and he, too, has a
blog.
Although I've never grown asparagus before now, it seems like a good place to start this year, not just alphabetically, but because it's almost Valentine's Day and asparagus is supposedly an aphrodisiac. I read where ancient Egyptians offered it to the gods. It's a good source of folate, potassium, and vitamin C, and China, it seems, grows most of the world's supply. In the United States, production is concentrated in California, Michigan, and Washington. Tomatoes are recommended as a companion plant in the garden to repel asparagus beetles.
I'm pretty sure there are more gardening books than dandelions out there, not that the abundance of either is a bad thing. I say this because once a week I do a volunteer shift checking in library materials, and I always come home with a pile of books about growing food, to read or skim. Just when I think I've seen them all, I find another I've never heard of that intrigues me.
