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From the Archives
Archive for May, 2009
Made in Michigan: Lemon Verbena Soy Candles by Green Daffodil Soy Candleworks
You know that segment on Oprah where she shows off and gives away her Favorite Things? Well, this is my version of that. “Colleen’s Favorite Things” has a nice ring to it, eh?
I am a scented candle fanatic. My entire family knows that if they don’t feel like buying yet more gardening stuff for me, a gorgeous scented candle is always a hit. Right now, I’m absolutely crazy for these Lemon Verbena soy candles from Green Daffodil Soy Candleworks.
First off, I’m a sucker for the container–a pretty, square stainless steel tin with lid and a very pretty label. But these candles are all about the fragrance, and I can tell you that it’s absolutely phenomenal. If you love lemon verbena you will adore these candles. These are high quality candles: they do not smoke, and they just seem to burn forever. I often have one burning while I’m working during the day. Just gorgeous.
To give you some background about the company, it was started by two friends from Ferndale, who started the business during one of our long, cold Michigan winters. They sell the candles at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center and through their Etsy shop.
So, because I love them, and because I love my readers even more, I’m giving away one awesome Green Daffodil candle in your choice of fragrance to a lucky ITGO reader. But you have to work (just a little!) for it. In the comments, tell me: if you could capture any fragrance in the world in a candle, what would it be? I’ll pick my favorite, you’ll pick which nature-inspired scented candle you’d like me to send you, and you’ll end up with an awesome Michigan-made product.
Deadline for comments is Sunday at midnight.
(And here’s the fine print, for those of you who may be wondering. I don’t know either of the ladies at Green Daffodil, and I am most certainly not being paid or otherwise reimbursed for mentioning the company. I love my state, and I want to start promoting some of my favorite locally-made products. I hope whoever wins the candle will spread the word about this great, eco-friendly company.)
15 comments
The Front Garden in Spring: Before and After
I was looking through some of my photos, and came across some that I took last spring of the front garden, which, as I’ve mentioned before, has been expanded and redesigned. So far, I’m pretty happy with the results:
This is how it looked last spring (before we removed that ugly-ass awning—which was a huge improvement all by itself!)
A decent start. We started that island bed mainly because grubs had made a mess of the lawn and I just didn’t feel like putting in the effort to fix the grass when I’d so much rather have flowers. It was way too small, but it was a huge effort just to dig out the remaining sod and double-dig that little area, battling tree roots the whole way.
This is the bed last fall:
Getting better! My main complaint with the garden at this time of year is that there is absolutely nothing blooming. I’ll have to do something about that this year. You’ll notice that the garden’s been expanded quite a bit, and that awful kidney shape is gone. I went with a large rectangle to mimic the straight lines of the house, and straightened the border on the bed near the porch as well. You see the bit of lawn that surrounds the bed? Unfortunately, we probably have to leave at least that much. Our city ordinances state that every home must maintain a lawn area in the front yard. This is our nod to a “lawn.” Really, it’s a garden path that gives us access to both the bed and the hedge.
And here’s the garden now:
I’m pretty happy with it. I like that it’s pretty packed with blooms right now between the bearded irises, alliums, and shastas. Earlier this spring it was loaded with tulips and daffodils. The Siberian irises are coming on now, and in a bit the coneflowers, hollyhocks, and daylilies will be going full speed. I’ve also put a few zinnias and cosmos in here to fill in some bare spots. I’ll share a few photos once the next wave of blooms come in.
10 comments
On the myth of “we don’t need no stinkin’ ‘how to garden’ books”
It’s in vogue right now, depending on which garden blogs you read, to hear that we don’t need any more books telling us how to garden, that encyclopedic “how to grow X plants” books are a worthless waste of time. All we need to know, it seems, is to plant veggies in full sun, give them water, and, oh yes, mulch.
Uh, OK.
I can tell you in all honesty that if some garden writer had given me that advice when I started growing vegetables, I would have probably done one or two things, first of which might have been quitting on gardening because despite following that bit of super-helpful advice, my garden failed to thrive. Second, I would have seriously wanted to slap someone upside the head had I paid twenty bucks or more and gotten advice like that. But, that’s just me.
I can also tell you that I felt this way long before I wrote one of those “how to grow vegetables” books. As a new gardener, I totally depended on several how-to, encyclopedic-type books. Did I need to know all of the information in the book at that time? No. But I knew that if I had a problem, it was likely that the answer lied in one of the books lining my shelves. I think that, when I was starting out, having that crutch of “I can find the answer in my books” was a comfort to me. It all felt less confusing and a lot less daunting when I knew that whatever came up could likely be figured out with the help of a book.
And now, with record numbers of people starting their first vegetable gardens, that hunger for basic, straight-talking garden advice is stronger than ever. I’m a volunteer at AllExperts, which is owned by About.com. I volunteer to answer questions about organic gardening and vegetable gardening. After one day on the volunteer list, I had to put a limit on how many questions I would accept per day. Some of my recent questions:
–The leaves on my tomato are curling up…why?
–I have shiny little black bugs on my potato plants. What are they and how do I get rid of them?
–How do I get rid of the aphids in my vegetable garden?
–What is this dark area on the bottoms of my tomatoes, and what do I do about it?
–I have this weird, gray fungus on the base of my pea vines. What is it?
–How do I get rid of slugs?
None of these people want to hear “plant in full sun. give it water. and mulch!” And while these particular gardeners are turning to the internet, there will always be a certain group of people who feel much better with a book in hand. I’m one of them.
I saw a quote once that said something like “you can tell the worth of a gardening book by how much dirt is on the pages.” I tend to agree with that. Maybe I’m overly practical, or maybe I’m not so far removed from what it was like to be a new gardener that I’ve forgotten what it felt like to take up a trowel for the first time, wondering what the hell I was doing.
Writer Natalie Goldberg calls this “beginner’s mind.” In terms of writing, it’s the phase we all must pass through during which we don’t trust our own experiences and abilities and we’re likely to quit because it’s all just too damn hard. It doesn’t sound all that different from what many novice gardeners go through for their first few seasons, does it?
I’m not picking on the people who say “plant in sun, water, and mulch.” Technically, they’re perfectly right. And it’s also true that plants grow. It’s what they do. Nine times out of ten, you can put a plant in the ground, follow that basic bit of advice, and enjoy the fruits of your labor. It’s that other one out of ten times that’s a real bitch, and can often make a new gardener feel like enough of a failure that they decide it might be better to just hang up their trowel for good.
Maybe I’m totally off on this one, and if so, it wouldn’t be the first time. I’m one of those people who has always believed that no matter the question, I could find the answer in a book. So far, that’s worked for me, so I’m not all that willing to change my outlook on this. Wondering what y’all think about this: is the garden how-to book a waste of time?
10 comments
The Good Life
You know you’re living the good life when:
1. You can enjoy the amazing fragrance of a bouquet of flowers for your desk every week from May through September.
2. You can eat delicate, flavorful mesclun salads for lunch several days a week.
3. You can enjoy mint tea anytime you want it.
4. You can step outside at any given moment and experience a whole thriving ecosystem of birds, squirrels, butterflies, bees, and plants (and myriad things you can’t see).
5. Your plots are planted, and you can look forward to several months of fresh, healthy food for your family.
And it’s all possible through gardening. It’s not expensive, or flashy, and it isn’t all that likely to make the news. It’s a life that you build for yourself, day by day, through a million tiny (and some Herculean) efforts. A dandelion pulled here, some mulch added to the soil there. A new bed dug and an old bed improved yet again. A seed sown, a seedling watered, a shrub pruned.
Tiny, simple actions that, one by one, coalesce into what can only be called “the good life.”
5 comments
Why I Hate the Whole “Recession Gardening” Thing
It’s one of those phrases that makes me cringe each and every time I read or hear it, kind of like “compassionate conservatism” or “drill, baby, drill.” It’s a meaningless phrase, more B.S. spewed by both the mainstream and gardening media to try to inject my beloved garden with a little bit of the fear that sells magazines, newspapers, and air time.
I don’t want it. I do not want my garden in any way associated with the mortgage crisis, unemployment, Wall Street assholes or the idiots who decided that de-regulating our financial industry was a phenomenal idea.
More than that (as if that wasn’t all enough…) I don’t like what the “recession gardening” trend does for gardening. The underlying tenor of the whole thing is the same as when you go on a strict diet for a while: this is just something I have to endure until things get better. Once that happens, my life can go back to normal.
Is that what gardening is supposed to be?
It’s not so far removed from the Victory Garden movements during WWI and WWII, except, perhaps, in tone. The Victory Garden movements empowered people, at least for a little while (though many of those intrepid, patriotic gardeners gave up gardening as soon as life normalized again, as well). Recession gardening, to me, at least, screams of victimization and fear. As someone over on Garden Rant commented (See Garden Rant’s post about this here), the run by some on seeds and starter plants at the nursery to fend off starvation is disturbingly similar to those who are stocking up on ammunition in case this is it and society as we know it comes tumbling down.
Do we really want to live like this? Is this the basis upon which to form a lifetime love of soil, plants, and bugs? I’ve always seen gardening as the ultimate celebration of life, a truly optimistic endeavor, and an oasis of peace in our ordinarily insane and overscheduled lives. While I know that to our ancestors, an abundant garden meant survival, I hardly think we’re in that boat now. Nor do I think we will be again. Do I think we should grow as much of our own food as possible? Yes, of course. Do we need to know where our food comes from? Absolutely. But anything done out of fear is doomed to retain a negative connotation, especially for those who try it and fail (as so many of us fail, both at the beginning and throughout our gardening lives).
Gardening deserves so much more. Take the fear-mongering elsewhere. Gardening provides more than sustenance. A connection to nature, intimate understanding of how food reaches our table, and a stewardship of a bit of land, no matter how big or small, is what growing our own food is all about. Let’s not cheapen it by turning it into the gardening world’s version of the cabbage soup diet.
15 comments
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