LIVING GREEN
Home-grown harvest
Advertiser Staff
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Getting started on a small food garden at home isn't that hard, but it's definitely dirty. Ask Kathy McKenzie of Lanikai, who likes to mix her own soil using equal parts lava rock, chicken manure and peat moss.
But that's part of the fun, she says.
"There's something that connects you with the earth when you're playing with chicken manure and things."
The plot of land she and her husband bought several years ago had just enough space for a small two-story home (which they built with termite-resistant cypress wood), leaving skinny bits of land on all sides.
They built around the prodigious banana trees that were already there. On the land that was left, they planted fruit trees, including lemons, limes, tangelos and avocados.
They also grow herbs in pots on their lanai, and aloe vera just about everywhere else.
McKenzie's recommendations for starting your own food garden:
(In addition to seeds, saplings and knowledgeable gardeners, nurseries also have plenty of mixed soil if you'd rather have someone else handle the chicken manure, but McKenzie notes, "It's a bit cheaper to make your own.")
"I made sure the birds and cat weren't around," she said. "You have to weigh the pros and cons when choosing your plants. If you have to spray often, you probably don't want to grow it."
URBAN VEGGIE GARDENING IS SWEEPING THE NATION
By Barbara Mahany and Beth Botts
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — Zig-zagging her cart past the wall of compost manure and around a few empty pots, Andrea Versenyi arrived, at last, at the root of her night-rousing visions: row upon row of bright, shiny seed packets.
A tad leery about carrots, intimidated by broccoli, still the self-described "timid urban gardener" forged on, fingering her way through the vegetable alphabet — arugula to zucchini.
"Let it be known that I have no idea what I'm doing, but that's OK. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed," she announced, more or less to the packets themselves, then whirled into what would become a mantra to calm her newborn agricultural angst: "This is an experiment. This is my starter garden, right?"
Versenyi is hardly alone, wide-eyed and quaking in her not-yet-turned vegetable plot.
On March 20, Michelle Obama and 23 fifth-graders from Washington's Bancroft Elementary broke ground on a 1,100-square-foot White House kitchen garden, intending to grow 55 vegetables, from tomatillos to Thai basil.
According to the National Gardening Association, some 9 million Americans are set to press sole to shovel and carve out a swath of what might be called the new American kitchen garden — or the Liberty Plot, or Just Plain Old Common Sense Laid Out in Rows.
Part reclaiming the earth, part a chance to swat back the recession and part ol' American can-do credo, it all adds up to a vigor for vegetable plots that hasn't been seen since Eleanor Roosevelt dug up the White House lawn amid the food crunch of World War II and birthed a nation of victory gardens.
All told, an estimated 43 million American households will be poking in seeds and, if all goes well, plucking backyard edibles.
