Strawberry rhubarb crumble smoothie. Salad with fresh herbs and flower blossoms. Zucchini herb fritters with garlic yogurt. Roasted Hubbard squash soup with hazelnuts and chives. Smoky chipotle popcorn. Pumpkin pie. Fruit wine. Beer. Delicious! What if the main ingredients for these recipes came from your garden? Excited?
As a child growing up in Poland we frequently foraged for berries, nuts and mushrooms. Alpine strawberries were my favorite. I helped my parents tend our community garden too. Then we moved, far, far away. I started designing in high school when an interior design class was offered in my senior year. Jumping on a chance to design a Beaches hotel in Jamaica I delighted in breadfruit, jerk chicken, ackee and salt fish, conch soup and ginger beer. I tuned the experience into internship credits toward my Interior Design degree. Then I met this guy.
Raising twins wasn’t challenging enough so I started baking and decorating cakes while working toward a Business Administration degree. That was fun! We grew herbs and made mud pies and started reading food labels. It was time to introduce the girls to the wonderful world of really good food. Rows of vegetables with bare soil between seemed, from the design point of view, really ugly and highly inefficient. I introduced myself to Permaculture, edible forest gardens, landscaped gardens which are mostly edible, and turned our entire yard into a giant experiment and started keeping bees. This is even more fun!
What can I do for you? A simple planter on a balcony? A few planters in the backyard? Your entire property?