Patio Garden

Mary bought me a book for Christmas called The Urban homestead.



I like it. I made sourdough bread from scratch with the help of a recipe in this book. Very tasty! Anyway, I love books like this but every time I read one I want to buy a 15 acre farm complete with livestock, barns, chicken coops and a creek. It's quite a leap from our 2 bedroom apartment situation. This book gave some great advice:

Where you are is your homestead. Do what you can with what you have.

I like the idea. I feel like I live too much of my life waiting to live. So this year I decided to grow as much of a garden as I can on our apartment patio.



We've got a couple kinds of tomatoes (grape and pear), a red bell pepper, a jalapeno and copious amounts of basil. I love fresh basil. It's one of my favorite herbs. The problem is that I hold it in too high of esteem. I have purchased fresh basil and waiting for a "special occasion" to use it, only to find it wilted and moldy when the occasion arrived. So I planted a lot of it, so I don't have to be timid in using it. I bought one start about a month ago and planted seeds around the tomatoes at the same time. So far the seeds have sprouted and are about a half and inch tall while the start has grown about 5 inches in the same amount of time.



The tomatoes are blooming now and should be producing quite a few tomatoes. That is assuming that they survive the relentless attacks of one certain Ethan that has more than once mistaken their metal protective cages as basketball hoops. But that's another story.

More later...