Eat Close to Home, Foodshed Planet, and Flowers Indoors

The garden blog, Eat Close to Home, has posed a victory garden challenge and the author offers personal assistance to the first five responders, even if you do not live close to Ann Arbor Michigan. Such a deal.


Photos: Snow pea and pole bean flowers last spring.


Foodshed Planet is the originator of the idea and becoming a Companion Planter is at the core of the plan. The basics include the fundamentals of community building at its best.

Help each other; be part of a shared effort to help more people grow and eat home grown food.

Create a planting bed for someone else, share some of your perennial plants or annual seeds with them. Pass on gardening books and magazines. Share the produce from your garden or make something out of them and share the prepared food.



A quote from the blog, "My mom had a garden that she called her Friendship Garden because everything in it had been given to her by friends."

Sounds wonderfully nostalgic and I wish I could grow vegetables well enough to be one of those people. Only a few things grow well for me so far, but I share them.

Foodshed links to Hills and Plains Seedsavers in Australia in their discussion of getting friends involved in growing food. Click through to get inspired to grow some of your own food this spring.



The goals Foodshed set are not small. Their goals are: 2-million new gardens in 2008, Victory Garden poster (poster competition deadline is March 1), and to find sponsors who would be willing to offer a discount to Victory Garden participants.

FLOWERS
Cooking Light Magazine has an article on how to grow amaryllis and paperwhite narcissus bulbs in the Jan/Feb issue. I don't shop much, so I didn't know amaryllis bulbs are still in stores.
If you find some on a late sale and want to grow them on a windowsill here are the instructions:
* Fill a container half full with rocks or potting soil and sprinkle with a pinch of horticultural charcoal.
*Nestle the bulbs into the rocks, pointed end up. Set multiple bulbs close together without touching each other or the pot.
*Arrange the rest of the stabilizing element (soil or stones) around the bulbs high enough to hold without burying. (The top one-third of the bulb should be above soil or stone line.)
* Add water until roots are covered, but keep level below bottom of the bulb to prevent rotting.

The amaryllis that I bring out every year, is in its fourth winter and has sprouted beautiful leaves. After it blooms, I tuck it behind a door to dry out until summer. When the weather is reliably above 60-degrees, I put it outside to build up the bulb for the next winter.

If you want your amaryllis to last from one year to the next, use the potting soil method.

I grow Paperwhite narcissus using the stones and water method described above. After they finish blooming I put them outside, then plant them in the garden in the spring.