Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Art...and how it affects your vegetables

"That Look"- 8x10, coloured pencil on Mi-Teintes.
Please contact artist if interested in purchasing.
Copyright Rita Woodburne

Glad you're back, dear reader. Despite the chilly weather here in Ontario that seems to have befallen us again (and after such an awesome week-end), it's time to start thinking about planting. Next to art, vegetable gardening is one of my passions because when I'm not doing art I try to make sure that I'm eating...or at least preparing something to eat.
With that in mind you can look foward to one day a week for my blog to contain gardening content, more specifically organic vegetable gardening content. Please don't ask me to talk about flowers, the trade-off for my excessively green thumb with vegetables was that I wound up with an almost black thumb when it comes to flowers. Tragic, I know, but at least I can grow those flowers that are beneficials for my veggies.

So to get this ball rolling I should note a few things:
- I live in a 5b zone bordering on 5a (I can hear non-gardening people scratching their heads already) so my planting times will obviously be for this zone. If you live in a 4a or 9b I can't tell you specifically when you need to plant your onions.
- When pests/ diseases arrive I will always try a non-toxic (organic) solution first.
- I start almost all of my veggies from seed (untreated organic when available). I try to avoid pre-grown plants because I don't know what they've done to them or where they've been... much like a suspicious co-worker that always arrives late and stinks of rum.
- In reference to the first point, all of my fertilization tricks and pest/ disease remedies work regardless of zone.

Planning a good garden is much like planning a good work of art. There's surface preparation, pre-planning of what goes where, composition and fitting elements together that work well. You thought I was kidding about art affecting veggies, didn't you?

Get your seeds out, peat pots and potting soil ready because starting next week I'll get right into all the growing goodness!

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