Planting a Vegetable Garden

After reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben), I decided to plant a vegetable garden.

I don’t know the first thing about gardening. I did plant rosemary a few years ago and put it in everything I cooked that year. Still, that’s the extent of my knowledge.

Well I went to Valley View Farms in Cockeysville, Maryland and bought:

• 4 varieties of sweet peppers (Big Bertha, Early Sensation, Purple Beauty and Valencia)
• 4 varieties of tomatoes (Radiator Ray’s heirloom Mortgage Lifter, Lemon Boy, heirloom Yellow Pear, Grape)
• 1 bunch of yellow Granex hybrid onion
• 3 summer squashes (Raven, Yellow Straightneck, Peter Pan)
• 1 thing of Silver Queen Corn (which seemed to have lots of plants in it)
• 1 artichoke
• 1 Crimson Sweet watermelon
• 1 Superstar muskmelon
• 1 Burpee hybrid cucumber
• 1 Bambino hybrid eggplant
• Genovese basil
• Tuscan Blue rosemary
• cilantro
• parsley
• garlic chives
• and a few other things.

I’d also like to get some strawberries, raspberries, and asparagus but apparently you have to buy those earlier in the year?

I don’t know what got into me. I suppose reading about Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan also had an influence on me.

Wish me luck!