We are two New Yorkers completely addicted to city life- french toast at 4 am? Any ethnic food conceivable at our fingertips? Enough museums, concerts, & cultural institutions to enable a visitor to see one a day for life and never see it all? Yes please.
And yet, we can't resist the insatiable urge to garden! There is nothing more satisfying than serving up a plate full of beautiful fruits & veggies to guests and saying 'I grew that myself!'
Over the course of the next year we will share the successes and failures of our own gardening endeavors. Hopefully, it will inspire others to get out there and plant a seed or two themselves! Remember - no matter how hip your haircut is, how tight your jeans are, or how Facebook dependent you've become, there is still a gardener deep down inside you.
A little more about the keepers of this blog:
Jen Rock - Gardening has been a part of my life since I was a toddler, pulling the heads off of flowers in my mother's garden and handing them to her, much to her chagrin. My mother spent hours tending the gardens at our first home, and expanded to a full blown vegetable garden and various ambitious landscaping projects of her own once we moved to a larger bit of land to work with. I was a diligent helper to her (And by diligent, I mean when it got too hot/my back hurt/I was bored, I'd go inside and turn on the TV), back bent and weeding, harvesting dozens of tomatoes and potatoes, and willing the rest of our crops to grow so lush. The gardening bug stuck with me as though it were in my blood. Well into my fourth year living in NYC, I finally gave in to my gardening urges and started small, with planter boxes out on my fire escape. Never having had access to a back yard while living in the city, I improvised, with varying degrees of success. What started as a handful of herbs and a smattering of bean plants, has now evolved into my most ambitious planting year yet. I look forward to sharing the results of my hard work and hopefully, passing on a bit of knowledge in the process to inspire more people to get creative and get out there and garden!
Kate Taylor - Having mastered such skills as baking, sewing, ironing, home decorating & nagging my man, gardening seemed the next logical step in my quest towards womanly perfection. Little did I know it would become one of my favorite and most rewarding hobbies.
I've always been one to surround myself with nature- as a teenager my bathroom was filled with spider plants instead of cosmetics, and orchid after orchid succumbed to the dry, sunless abyss that was my first New York City apartment. But last year was the first time I was able to attempt any kind of real gardening on a larger scale. With my super's permission I adopted the long-neglected patch of earth behind our apartment, and after battling weeds the size of lou ferigno and a vast army of stray cats, I was able to bend the land to my will. Sortof.
I had many successes and just as many failures, but in true Kate Taylor fashion I will not scale back but instead forge ahead with even greater ambitions & higher hopes for this year's harvest! From the first seed in the ground to the last tomato on the vine, I look forward to sharing the journey with you, dear readers.
