A quiet day

I hope all of you who have been celebrating holidays this week have had a peaceful and meaningful holiday time. Here in the US we had our day of Thanksgiving on Thursday, and it was so nice to be able to gather onion, garlic, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme from my garden to go in the turkey stuffing. I make rice stuffing with herbs, fried giblets, and wild rice, passed down from my mother, and it was delicious. :D

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It's raining outside, so not much will be going on in the garden today, except covering the tender plants since there's a frost coming tonight.

The banana plants and fig tree seem to have survived their freezing ordeal -- the weather here has gone from cold to warm to cold, and I'm not sure that they know what to do. The fig dropped all the crispy leaves and has a lovely growing bud tip as if it were spring, and I don't want that to be damaged, as it's only about a foot tall right now. One of the bananas is trying to grow new leaves!

Plants are tenacious, that's for sure.

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Since I don't have much to show you today I thought I might update you on my thoughts on the Food4Wealth program that I've been going through. It occurred to me that last time I talked about it, I didn't actually mention much about it.

I have been looking for something to offer to beginning food gardeners, because about a third of the people who come over to the Edible Landscape Design site have no knowledge of gardening at all (which is a bit daunting, since it isn't a beginner site), and I don't really want to set up a beginning gardening course right now. Maybe in the future, but not now.

So when I saw Food4Wealth was the best selling gardening ebook on Clickbank (which is a place that helps you sell ebooks), it intrigued me enough to take a look.

(Full disclosure: I did get a free copy for review. Which is actually a good thing, because firms that do that believe in their product and aren't trying to scam their customers. I was very happy with the communications I had with the company.)

Now, I don't care for the name, as it seems a bit hyped, as is his presentation. And on the outset, $34 for a book seems a bit steep. But I like what I've seen so far of the actual information very much. The methods are entirely organic, and the book gives solid advice.

The thing is that you're not just getting a pdf book. Included are 14 videos to show you what to do, a set of audiobooks, and a set of checklists to help you through. I was impressed with the amount of information you get for the money.

And while for me as someone who's been gardening forever, the video presentations seem over-solicitous, for someone who's never gardened before and might be just a tad afraid of ruining things (if not outright panicked at the thought of doing something wrong and killing their plants), it's probably just right.

The thing that interests me the most is his assertion that you can grow using his method all year round without using any sort of protection for your plants. His accent is Australian, so I'm presuming that this is where he's from.

From what I've read so far, his methods will indeed work quite well in Australia (which has much milder weather than most of the US -- their coldest zone is about 7b), as well as in areas of the world which have similar conditions. If that means you, go ahead and get it -- I definitely recommend it ... but whether it will work here is what I want to see for myself.

So I've devised a garden plan for my backyard (which is where I do all my experimenting!) ... it will be both ornamental and use the Food4Wealth method, and we shall see what happens. :)

Blooming in November

It's a blustery day outside, but I ran across the Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day and even though I'm a day late on this, I thought, "what a great idea". Of course, then I had to go take some photos.

This last photo is of the saffron crocuses I planted just a month and a half ago. I never thought they would be up and blooming already!

Go over to the May Dreams Garden blog to see even more flowers. :)

A few odds and ends ....

A lot has been going on lately, so I'll pile it all up here (sort of like the leaves, which seem to never stop coming ...)

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I got all of the kale, cabbage, and strawberries planted. Some of them ended up in the backyard, which is fine.

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A freeze happened early in the week that caught me by surprise, so both of my banana plants are pretty sad looking. I think they're both still alive, but we'll see. My fig tree in the back is pretty crispy as well, but I'm sure it'll be fine, as the stem is still green. I need to get them mulched before the next freeze comes by, though.

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If you're a subscriber to my newsletter, you know that I've had this running poll going on for several months now. The most surprising thing about the poll is that about a third of my subscribers are total rank beginners and know nothing about either gardening or landscaping.

Since that's not really who I intended to target with the site, I have been thinking for a while about writing something to help them out. While doing research into the subject, I ran across an e-book titled "Food4Wealth" that interested me enough to look into it as a possible thing to offer those of you who really don't know a thing about gardening.

So I got the information and have been working through it (there's a lot here!). I'll be writing some of my thoughts about it over the next few months. Since this is both a process of gardening that's new to me and something that involves living things, it's not as easy as just writing a review on a book. I really need to try his suggestions out before I can make a determination one way or the other as to whether this is something I want to recommend.

More on that later.

Memorial

Right after I posted that last blog post I got a call that my father in law had passed away. Since my husband can't travel due to health issues, we are having a memorial here today at the same time as the one where my father in law lived (as does most of our family).