The Rebirth of Almostima

If you are joining from http://almostima.wordpress.com/, welcome. 

I started blogging about 5 years ago and gardening 4 years ago.   Sadly, I've neglected both.   

The blogging suffered because I had been on the Wordpress format and they seem to have taken great lengths to make the free blogging experience as painful as possible.  I can't tell you how many pictures I have on my camera that have not been downloaded because it seemed like such a pain.  Instead, I'd get my validation from posting quick pictures to Facebook and getting some "likes."  But it's the more contemplative nature of blogging that gets lost in this approach.  We miss out on the deep thoughts, the funny, the absurd, the recipes, the fully fleshed memories, the life lessons, the deeper connection. 

The gardening was nowhere near as abandoned, but I came to grips with my limitations.  Over the years I was getting more limited returns from the garden.  Sure, there were some rock stars in the bunch.  The garlic this year was probably my favorite crop.  But I was worried that I had depleted my soil, or wasn't watering enough from the other raised beds where plants were clearly struggling.  The more they struggled, the less attention I wanted to give them.

So, I decided to throw money at the problem.  I engaged the services of Start Organic -- a vegetable gardening service and they will bail me out.  Or rather, they will teach me the things that I should have known at the get-go but had been winging all this time.  The first lesson was that I had burned the top few inches of my soil by not mulching.  Oops.  The second was that I really needed an irrigation system because I was not consistently getting water to the plants that needed it.  

So here goes ... we have the raised beds free of weeds, with new compost, and irrigation.  This weekend we will have an instructor come by with plant starts and she will give the whole family a lesson, re-appearing once a month to check on our progress.  Here is hoping that we grow as well as the plants.

Here's some starting shots.  We had a great crop of volunteer pumpkins -- which are now decorating our front porch on their way to becoming pie, pancakes, funnel cakes, etc.  How festive!  We also have a beautiful volunteer chard plant out of compost piles from years past.  We left in tact some plants that had been doing really well, like the massive sage plant, the oregano (not pictured) and the parsley.

Stay tuned for more posts on DIY gardening/cooking projects, parenting stuff, and whatever else bounces around my little head.