The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul. ~ Alfred Austin

I love gardening! It’s probably my oldest hobby after eating pizza. I remember working in the garden with my mom when I was four or five years old. My job back then was radishes. I still love growing radishes and when I talk to teachers about bringing a gardening lesson into the classroom I always recommend starting with radishes. Basically they’ll grow almost anywhere, they grow fast and are colorful so they are really exciting for little kids, and big kids like me. The other plant I recommend are peas, it’s really exciting to watch them both grow and climb. Unfortunately my peas didn’t do great last year. I start almost every gardening season by laying in a quick crop of radishes. For my tiny patio garden this year, I’ll be putting in my radishes later this week, it would have happened yesterday but I forgot to buy the seeds.

This is my second year in an apartment with a patio while living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Last year was really an experiment to see what would grow, and how long of a growing season I really have here. The biggest surprise really was how incredibly long the growing season is, particularly for tomatoes. I was still getting tomatoes well into November.

Without a doubt my single greatest love in a vegetable garden is growing tomatoes. Last year, I had six tomato plants and I experimented with a cherry tomato plant, I’d never grown them before. I also cheated on the cherry tomatoes by buying a fully grown plant. My main hope was to get some early cherry tomatoes to appease my desire until the big tomatoes started coming in. This year I went a little hog wild on the tomato side. I’ve got six tomato plants and then I bought two fully grown cheaters, the one early girl plant already has two golf ball sized tomatoes already on it. Last year I planted this garden in late May, but this year I’m in a month earlier. Given how late my tomato plants produced last year I’m looking forward to five to six months of homegrown tomatoes, that’s just heaven. For this reason I also only planted indeterminate species.

In addition to tomatoes, I’m growing basil, a variety of lettuces, spinach, cilantro and of course my radishes. I still have some scallions from last season, as well as lemon balm and mint that survived the winter. Last year I grew cucumbers and squash and frankly they produced but not very well, the same with the carrots that I grew so while they are all staple garden plants for me, in the patio garden containers they just didn’t work very well.

My other love in a garden are roses. I got that love from the man pictured above, my Grandpa Kane who taught me how to grow roses when I was young. I wasn’t really into flowers and he brilliantly got me into growing roses by explaining that first, you have to go fishing. I was really into fishing, so I was in. To explain why he said this, he always put a fish in the bottom of the hole where he would plant the bush to act as fertilizer. I’ve been growing roses ever since. So in his honor today I bought a rose bush to add to the tiny patio garden.

One thing I’m really happy about is how well my lavender bush did over the winter and here it is in all of it’s purple spring glory, lavender is one of my favorite scents and I love growing these plants. I hope you had the chance to do something that made you happy this weekend. Have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane