From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden
by Amy Stewart
Overview
From the publisher:
Amy Stewart had a simple dream. She yearned for a garden filled with colorful jumbles of vegetables and flowers. After she and her husband finished graduate school, they pulled up their Texas roots and headed west to Santa Cruz, California. With little money in their pockets, they rented a modest seaside bungalow with a small backyard. It wasn't much—a twelve-hundred-square-foot patch of land with a couple of fruit trees, and a lot of dirt. A good place to start. From the Ground Up is Stewart's quirky, humorous chronicle of the blossoms and weeds in her first garden and the lessons she's learned the hard way. From planting seeds her great-grandmother sends to battling snails, gophers, and aphids, Stewart takes us on a tour of four seasons in her coastal garden. Confessing her sins and delighting in small triumphs, she dishes the dirt for both the novice and the experienced gardener. Along the way, she brings her quintessential California beach town to life—complete with harbor seals, monarch butterfly migrations, and an old-fashioned seaside amusement park just down the street. Each chapter includes helpful tips alongside the engaging story of a young woman's determination to create a garden in which the plants struggle to live up to the gardener's vision.
My thoughts
I LOVE THIS BOOK!! Who'd have thought that a book written in the style of a travel essay about planting a garden would be so entertaining?! I am loving this book! I'm telling you, I love it!
I will confess that I picked it up from bookcloseouts.com for under $3.00. WHAT A STEAL! I'm going back to buy at least 5 more copies to send to friends. When I read about the cats in the garden, I was laughing like crazy, definitely able to relate to the dance with the chicken wire. When I read about testing the soil, I was soooooo there!! I have done the very same thing with the very same results! And when I got to the worm composting part, it was all I could do to keep from running out and getting my own box of worms!!!
I think the most delightful part of this book is that the author is so willing to share her failures along with her successes. I'm a novice gardener, and have been for YEARS, and I've made my share of mistakes, many of which are described in this book! It's so comforting to know other people have done the same thing, and it's so fascinating to learn from her experiences. I can't wait to try some of her tips! It's just a great book for anyone who has the slightest interest in gardening. I'm loving it!
Favorite Passage
Just one??? Oohhhh, it is soooooo hard to choose just one!!!
I saw a worm composter for the first time on the student farm at our local university. It was a homemade thing, patched together out of old boards and wooden packing crates. A cupboard door served as a lid, and when I opened it, dozens of red wigglers squirmed under a pile of rotting lettuce. I lifted off the top tray -- this composter was made of three stacking trays -- and saw hundreds more sifting their way through crumbling black compost, which was almost the same color and consistency as coffee grounds. It seemed so ... farmlike, to have this little herd of worms to tend. So organic.
Worms have special needs, one of the apprentices at the farm told me. They don't like the rain or the cold. You have to keep lots of shredded newspaper on top of the compost to keep other bugs from getting in there with them. And they won't eat just anything. Their favorite foods are banana and melon skins, and they like coffee grounds. They can't have any fat or processed foods. And they'll eat orange peels or onion skins, but they save them until the very end, when there's nothing else to eat.
Oh, they're picky eaters, I thought. They have little personalities. I want them.
OK OK, just one more, OK?!?!?
I went back to the nursery and wandered around looking for the fertilizer section, walking up and down the aisles until I found what looked like my clique of serious gardeners, and I decided to buy whatever they were buying. The choices were a little gruesome for a long-time vegetarian like me: Dried blood. Bone meal. Fish emulsion. What does that mean, exactly, to emulsify a fish? I didn't want to know.
I was a little confused as I stood in the organic fertilizer aisle surrounded by aging hippies and small-time farmers, all in their Birkenstocks and their "I Brake for Tofu" t-shirts. These people all looked like vegetarians to me. Didn't the bone meal bother them? How did they rationalize it? They all seemed to shun the shiny little boxes of synthetic fertilizer, the only meat-free alternative. I couldn't figure it out. I felt like my tribe had let me down.
Finally I settled on a large, friendly looking box of Organic All-Purpose Fertilizer, which contained innocuous but suitable organic-sounding stuff: bat guano, earthworm castings, dried seaweed. I couldn't say for sure that no animal was harmed in the making of this fertilizer but it seemed better than the murky bottles of fish remains that were my other choices.
