Welcome!
Sharing information about growing good food is important to me, so that is mostly what will be on this website. I have been growing food for decades, and I have made plenty of mistakes, but I also have found a lot of joy and personal satisfaction in bringing food from our yard into the kitchen.
This new website is part of an ongoing writing project. It is the third blog that I have started with food-gardening as a focus.
The first blog was called Atlanta Veggies, and it is still available online because it is a "blogspot" site, like this one. The second blog, also with the name Small Garden News, was on Wordpress, and it disappeared from the internet when I quit paying for it to be there.
However, my food-gardening continues!
My Mississippi Garden
We moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, from metro-Atlanta, in the early spring of 2020. I went from gardening in red clay to gardening on a sand dune.
The switch has been a bit of a shock, but this past year has been mostly productive. It was a tough year in terms of the super-abundant stink bugs and a serious lack of rain, but we still have brought plenty of food in from the yard.
In advance of the recent pre-Christmas freeze, we harvested a pile of food from the garden, in case all the plants died in the cold:
The photo above shows kumquats, a tub full of mini salad greens, arugula, a little marjoram, a lone green tomato, cilantro, mustard greens, broccoli, assorted radishes, turmeric, and ginger.
Happily, a surprisingly large part of the garden survived four days in a row of temperatures that dropped to the low-to-mid-twenties. There is still plenty of food growing, for us to enjoy in the coming weeks.
Thanks for stopping by! -Amy at Small Garden News
Hi Amy, I just signed up for the new blog 😀 I didn't know that you moved out from Atlanta Metro area we just moved in the are a couple months ago to Gainesville. I rushed to put my cold veggies from pots to ground and then the cold snap arrived. I too cover everything and to my shock, swiss chatd, green turnip and arugula survived. Yes, I am too new to red clay soil. Lol I left sand soil in FL. I'm happy to follow your journey and learn from you. What zone are you in now? Thank you 😊
ReplyDeleteHi Shanti! I am now in zone 9a, on sand, but I spent more than 25 years (close to 30, really) growing food, flowers, and herbs in the red clay of zone 7. In the first decade or so, it had been zone 7a, but it slowly changed to 7b. It sounds like we are both in for some gardening adventures! Northeast of Atlanta, you will be getting some colder weather, but the soil should be mostly ok, unless a developer scraped off all the good stuff before building your home on the property. The good thing about red clay is that it holds nutrients a lot better than sand -- the nutritious bits from composts and fertilizers will stay in your garden where the plant roots can get to them! Thanks for stopping by and leaving the note! I love to hear from other gardeners and to hear their successes. Best wishes for great gardening! - Amy
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