The Garden Buzz

Cool Interactive Map: What's in Season?

Seems everyday someone wants to send me a product or pitch to review. I haven't been doing any reviews lately. While redesigning The Garden Buzz, I've been also re-evaluating whether I want to engage in the more commercial aspect of blogging. When it comes down to everything, I am foremost a writer, a photographer, who just happens to blog. 

And then I got this little gem in my email. I'll make an exception. With farmer's market season gearing up across the country, this might come in handy..

What Fruits and Veggies Are In Season? Courtesy of WEBstaurant Restaurant Supplies

 

 

The Dirt on Jane: Much More Than a Garden-Variety Memoir

Most days you'll find Jane Fishman working on her compost. She totes it in buckets in the back of a Taurus wagon from garden to garden, you see, she has three, in different parts of the city. It's that rich, crumbly moisture-conserving concoction that allows her to tend this lush garden in the actual "shade of a freeway" without any water source.

Yet it may be the free-fashioned art that catches your eye first. Found objects are repurposed and reimagined as garden decor. A tower of racially diverse dolls weathering into the same shade, a border of shovel heads and wine bottle edging amid a mashup of Mardi Gras beads; somehow it all works.

Late winter kale, broccoli and collards grow in island-shaped clumps around the industrial site turned Eden. Plum and loquat trees bear fruit with real wreckless abandon. Her latest fascination, fava beans are spotted here and there, at various stages of flowering, the quantity of black and white blooms promising a huge harvest.

A geurilla gardener before the term was even coined, she has lived and planted wherever her whims have taken her. Landing in Savannah, GA she worked as a reporter for years, one that knows "where the bones are". Now she justs wants to garden, although she still writes an engaging weekly column.

Her latest book, The Dirt on Jane, is more than mere gardening memoir, it's about aging, the fear of aging and forgiveness as she journeys between gardens, a late-in-life interlude at grad school and the nursing home attending to her mother's last years. Coming to terms with her mom in the years after coming out, she struggles with and strives to enjoy the often complicated mother-daughter dynamic.

Set in the south but universal in appeal, you can buy The Dirt on Jane by Jane Fishman from The Book Lady, 6 East Liberty in downtown Savannah or at www.lulu.com

 

For another great book recommendation from my travels in Savannah, check out the Back in the Day Bakery Cookbook on my Star Tribune community blog. A delicious read that just so happens to have a NE Minneapolis connection.

 

Spring Brings Changes to The Garden Buzz

I've come back to Minnesota just in time for the big thaw, and it's an early one. But if the Canadian geese are already back then it's probably not a false alarm. I place great stake on their comings and goings.

If anyone is old enough to remember their mother defrosting the Frigidaire, it's the same principle, a lot of drip, drip, crunch, drip, and a big sloppy mess. Mother Nature doesn't do it any better.

I like to say it's the ug-ugliest time of the year, when no outsiders should be allowed to visit the state. Drive down any freeway and witness the apocalyptic look of the landscape; black, rotting snow, exposed litter and sad, soggy brown grass. And that's not counting my driveway, not shoveled for months while I was away, it's a slushy, crusty, slippery disaster zone. 

Soon though the trees will be blooming, the frogs singing and that smell of damp earth and green growth will signal another season. I'm working on a litte re-birth in the blog department, aiming for a cleaner design and more readable (older eyes have asked for this) text, along with better use of photos. 

Meanwhile it may get worse before it gets better, as those road construction signs say, thanks for your patience.