As an author I have heard over and over that maintaining a blog has become an indispensable part of being a writer, as it gives you a place to publicize yourself and sell books. I could never write a blog solely for the purpose of promoting myself or making money (for one thing I don’t want to spend my life on the computer, I grew up before everyone was attached to them 24 hours a day and have never really learned to love them), however I am passionately interested in food gardening and this gives me all the motivation I need. I don’t want a blog where I write and people passively read though, I want it to be a two way street where readers give feedback to enrich the posts and we thereby educate each other. I would also like it to become a fairly personal community for committed food gardeners, a place where we can get to know each other, pick up new ideas, share solutions to problems and generally learn from each others mistakes.
Each If you have read my latest book it should come as no surprise that the emphasis of this blog will be on creating (and living in) the food garden and growing various edible plants (though I won’t neglect the topics of earlier books – using wild plants and vegetable gardening). My food garden has given me so much pleasure over the years that I want to encourage other people to do the same. I define the food garden as a garden created primarily to grow food (fairly obvious). It differs from a vegetable garden in that a much greater range of plants are grown and they take up the whole garden, rather than just a portion of it. I still have a vegetable garden area for growing conventional annual crops, but nearly everything I have planted in the rest of the garden is edible too. I have food growing all over the place and in much greater quantity and variety (walnuts, chestnuts, Oca, nectarines, watercress, taro, honeyberries, Quinoa, Kiwi fruit, lemons, mulberries, Chinese artichokes, water celery) When you really get into creating and maintaining this kind of garden it becomes an important part of your life and enhances it in many ways. This kind of hardworking whole food garden is still fairly unusual at the moment (which is why I am writing about it here), but it makes so much sense that I think it will eventually become the normal everyday garden. I predict that one day people will look back and laugh at the absurd concept of an “ornamental” garden; it will sound as silly as the idea of an “ornamental house” (one that’s beautiful but not actually meant to be used).
My food garden has been evolving for a few years now and in the process of creating it I gained quite a bit of practical experience as to how these kinds of gardens naturally come together. I wrote my book The New Food Garden to explain how these gardens might be created more quickly by identifying the key elements, functions, priorities and plants. I intend to use this blog to expand on what I wrote there (and in my other books) and share more of my ideas and insights. I have an inherent antipathy to excessive theorizing (it’s a far too common affliction amongst overly sedentary intellectuals) and an equally great appreciation of the value of genuinely practical advice. I will mainly focus on practical ways to make your garden more productive (how to integrate food plants into the garden, the best ways to grow food with minimal work and how the ultimate food garden might look and function). I will also talk about growing unusual food plants in various conventional and unorthodox ways and about my favorite edible plants (both domesticated and wild).
It is now August, which is a bad time of year to start a writing project because the garden is bursting with activity, the weather is beautiful and I would prefer to be out working in the garden rather than sitting at a desk, writing about working in the garden. To solve this I decided to take my laptop out on to my recently created patio (I’ve been laboriously hand making it for weeks), where I can sit on the Adirondack chair I made (from parts of an old redwood water tank) under the Kiwi arbor I built (from an old redwood deck I demolished) and write about gardening from there. At least I will be out in the garden. Ironically just after I wrote the above I injured my foot and now have to stay off my feet for a while. This is very frustrating when there is so much I want to do out there, but it does mean I can actually spend some time getting this blog going (it also means Comfrey poultices).
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