On growing a garden....

I have a friend. Okay, well I have a lot of friends. Sometimes, I think I have way too many friends and then there are those days when I think that the golfer might be my only friend. I have 190+ Facebook friends...but some of those people totally suck and I'm only friends with them so I can see their photos -- and they can see that I turned out to be a happy, healthy, double chinned northern Michigan woman with cute kids and a husband who is a good golfer. But, I digress.

But truly, this post is about just one friend. She doesn't buy anything processed, or packaged, or that includes high fructose corn syrup, or meat, or pretty much anything that I have in my cupboard. I took her son to his first fast food drive thru. He told his mom that
"there was a place you could go where you talk in a machine and drive to the window and you get french fries." She wasn't mad.

She doesn't crank up her heat in the winter or own/drive an over sized SUV and sit in the car line. In fact, she and her husband ride their bikes...everywhere, even in the winter. Anyway...even though I have to wear wool socks and slippers to stand on her kitchen floor in the winter and come home smelling like a wood burning stove, and the toilet seat in her downstairs bathroom feels like ice in the dead of winter...I still like her.

I like her mostly because she is a good listener and straight talker, but also because she is passionate about her way of life - and she doesn't judge me for the way I live. If she is a non-consumer, I am a mega-consumer. If I am air-conditioning, she is take a dip in the bay...oh wait, I don't have a/c...I prefer a dip in the bay.

It is from her, that I have learned so much...like that indeed there are positives of having a President who is a DEMOCRAT, how to do an entire applesauce making/canning project with ONE PIECE OF PAPER TOWEL, how lucky we are to live in such a great place and how to grow a garden.

So it's from her (and her husband who really I do believe is the family gardener) that Jeepers and I were inspired to start a garden...from seed. I got tips from her on things to plant, how to get stuff to germinate and a timeline. No mega store, no cash exchanged (well maybe a little for the containers I used and some seeds), just dirt, seeds, sunshine and water. AND HARK...we've got plants.

Maybe there is something too this.






xo -- B.M.