I tried to grow things when we were in the apartment and I managed to grow an impressive cache of purple basil I bought at Target on a whim. I have no clue as to what variety it was but it looked like these Dark Purple Opal Basil plants. That stuff grew like crazy and I used it in just about anything I could think of since I had so much of it. It didn’t have a strong basily flavor and was just so pretty…I just realized I miss my purple basil.
At any rate, Ollie was a youngin then and hadn’t developed the self-control required to keep his fat, little fingers out of my pots so Ollie pulled up all of my purple basil and then ground them up. That was the end of my basil growing days while we were in the apartment.
I’ve recently started reading about raised beds since our new backyard has massive drainage issues and DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW COMPLICATED THIS STUFF CAN GET?!
ONLY use rot resistant, untreated wood. Railroad ties are OK. Don’t worry about chemicals in the wood since they won’t leach into the soil. Use whatever you want but use a BPA-free plastic to cover the wood. ANY PLASTIC is evil. Don’t use the dirt from your yard. Don’t use compost. Definitely don’t use any sort of paper product in your compost. GMO plants/seeds are OK. GMO plants/seeds will cause you to sprout an extra arm.
And now my head hurts.
My mom’s mom had a garden until she physically couldn’t and I’m talking a HUGE garden. My father’s mother still makes a garden every year. The woman’s like 95 or something. That’s what I call dedication. The one thing that always struck me, even when I was little, was how easy they made it look. Sure they weeded and you had to till the ground and there was physical labor involved but they seemed unconcerned about the setting up of their garden. They just tossed in the seeds, complained about the birds and then their gardens just seemed to grow.
Surely it’s not as complicated as some of these websites make it out to be. Right? Surely it doesn’t cost as much as some of these websites say, right? Right?!
So I’ve made a sub-category especially for the garden so I can record the whole screwed up journey. Otherwise I’ll forget what I did and didn’t do. My memory’s broken. I gave the sub-category a fancy name: Garden.
At this very moment, this post is the only one in that sub-category but more will follow. You can receive emails specific to the Food and Drink category–which includes the Garden sub-category–if you subscribe to the baby feed below this post. Click on the Food and Drink icon and you’ll be good to go.
