Hi There! You have actually found my old blog, so c’mon over and check out the new place – The Creekside Cook
Lots of fresh recipes and sweet garden inspiration every week!
I decided this spring to add a gardening section to my menu, because as it always has, my blog is morphing along – this time to include more about the growing we do around here, along with the cooking and sitting on the front porch of an evening, enjoying watching the light go sideways while we enjoy a refreshing beverage.
I am also inspired by my latest project GardenStalking.com, and aggregation site for gardeners and garden blogs, modeled after “food porn” sites, and a sister project to my very own DessertStalking.com
We are extremely blessed to have nearly two acres of fertile “creek bottom” on which to garden. This land is actually the edge of the farm where Larry grew up, and we moved back over here in 1982, when Ellyn was 4 and Lauren was just 2 weeks old. When the girls were small, we just had a small “kitchen garden” that fed us through the summer months, but not much past it, though I did can any excess veg that didn’t get eaten up right away.
As the years went by and the girls grew up and got out on their own, we had more time, and our gardens have grown by leaps and bounds. As we get closer to retirement, we are determined to make our land pay for itself, because we are sure all of the taxes will continue to go up while our income will be more or less fixed. That means providing more and more of what we eat, so that we don’t have to buy it. Larry is in charge of the big vegetable garden, and the garlic, while I tend to the herb garden and small stand of fruit trees, as well as the decorative gardens. We both help each other with whatever needs doing of course. We are trying to discipline ourselves to keep more accurate records, and mark things better so we can keep track of what worked and what didn’t.
And though we garden because we want to feed ourselves, and because we want to know how our food was grown, and because in the long run it saves us money, the main reason we garden is because we love it. We are compelled. Driven. Obsessed. Gardening is pure joy to both of us, and there are few things in life that bring either of us more happiness than the stuff that we grow. We keep getting better at it, as we experiment and check out what other gardeners are doing, though heaven knows, we have our failures too.
I have done quite a few garden posts in the past, and a lot of posts that show how to use fresh vegetables in the recipes I love, but in the future, I plan to highlight that connection even more, along with more gardening “how-to” posts than I have had in the past. We keep on learning more every year, and I’m happy to pass along some of it, so that my readers can incorporate what they like into their own lives and garden. I hope you enjoy this slight shift in emphasis, and come back often to see what we have growing and cooking!
