january cabin fever

It is January in Philadelphia. It is cold. It is frequently dark.

It's time to start thinking about the garden.

Last summer marked my first true foray into gardening. While spending a year off before graduate school working in a mind-numbing retail job, I realized I lacked a certain sense of productiveness in my life. So I started a garden on the back steps of my apartment (left). Perhaps as much a way to make peace with the miserable Washington DC summer weather ("Gross: it's 95% humidity! Well, at least my vegetables are happy...") as a constructive hobby, my back-steps garden certainly gave me something to look forward to after work each day. My daily beeline to through the apartment and to the back steps to check on the plants sometimes trumped a substantial greeting to my boyfriend, Hank, but he (graciously) rarely mentioned it. Most of all, it gave me an opportunity to cool down from my bikeride home, take a few decompressing breaths to end the workday, and to assess what kind of fun botanical developments had happened that day.

I grew an assortment of vegetables and herbs last summer: eggplant, cucumbers, bush beans, and some pretty weird bell peppers, as well as basil, oregano, and catnip, and an ill-fated dwarf sunflower plant. With the exception of the catnip and a gifted bell pepper seedling, I grew everything from seed. I also grew everything in containers, because I had little access to a real yard. Overall, it was a learning experience. Some veggies were more prolific than others, some far more substantial than others, but no matter what, a baseball-sized eggplant grown from your own garden is way more exciting to eat than any purchased produce.

Last August, Hank and I have relocated to Philadelphia so I could begin my graduate studies at Temple University. The new apartment has a 10'x10' deck on the third floor with some solid afternoon sun. I will, of course, have to use containers again, but my workspace is much larger. The real challenge this year will be finding time to keep the garden going while up to my neck in PhD coursework. However, I trust that the garden will provide the same kind of fulfilling diversion as it has in the past.

In addition to the the pleasure of the harvest, I found that gardening complemented my other hobbies: photography and cooking. This year, I would like to add a fourth to that mix: writing. Last year's project was largely trial and error, guided by some much-needed advice from the more veteran veggers in my life, my parents and my then-next door neighbor. This year, with a bit of experience under my belt, I at least have some semblance of a plan. The last month of winter break has given me time to research, as well.

My hope is that this blog can serve not only as a narrative of my own experiences eking out crops (can I call them that?) from my concrete jungle of a city block, but also as a record for myself: what worked, what didn't, etc. Likewise, I am on a meager graduate student budget, so finding creative, inexpensive solutions for city gardening is something I hope others may find valuable. Or at least humorous: you may have noticed I recycle cat litter buckets as planters. There will be more of this. Also stay tuned for how I plan on getting many large bags of potting soil from the Home Depot to my third-floor apartment without a car or elevator, but hopefully not without Boyfriend, Lifter of Heavy Things.

Garden planning begins long before the end of winter is in sight, a thankful thing for people like me, who are more than ready for longer days and warmer weather. Philadelphia's last frost date is sometime in mid-April, but I plan on starting my seedlings indoors in the next few weeks. Next on the docket: building my own seedling nursery.