"Springtime belongs to the doers."

For me, summer has always been the garden.  We had a moderate one when I lived in Flint, MI and a big one when we got a few acres and moved to Dansville.  I'm not going to lie, sometimes I hated it.  Picking the long rows of vegetables with the hot sun beating down was not my idea of fun, especially when I could be reading a book or playing in the creek.  But worse than harvesting was picking rocks.  The soil for our garden was so rocky, and even though my brothers and I had to pick rocks all summer long, it seemed like we never made a dent.  But the fruits of our labors were always worth the cost, whether it was freshly snapped peas or the extra ice cream that rewarded us for our rock-picking (an extra scoop for every bucket we had collected)!  Nothing beats garden-fresh veggies, and the fresher the better.  I remember picking corn with Mom, and we would break for corn on the cob right there in the middle of the garden.

After moving to East Lansing into house with a yard, I decided to plant my own garden (pictured on the right) with some friends of mine.  The rototiller turned out to be hopeless for that soil, so we decided to do an experiment in no-till gardening.  That garden turned into a good learning experience for all involved, not to mention a lot of laughs and good stories.  And yes, it did yield!

Now I am a graduate student in Minnesota, and living in my first apartment.  For the first time in my life, summer is coming and I do not have a yard for a garden.  "Springtime is for the doers," The Home Depot commercial reminds me everytime I'm catching up on TV online, and for a while is was just an annoying reminder that I didn't get to be one of those people.  Then I decided to carve out my own garden in the only place I had extra room, my kitchen.

So, that's what this blog is chronicling, my newest gardening adventure.  Not that I was really knowledgeable about gardening in the first place; to me, gardening is planting, weeding, watering, picking, and eating.  I am not a master gardener in anyone's book.  In fact, I destroyed half of my friends' garden last year when I was house-sitting for them while they were on their honeymoon and forgot to water their starter plants.  But I'm doing it, and hopefully someone else can also learn from the mistakes I make along the way!